


The North Star

by SpaceWall



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Adopted Children, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arthur Dayne Lives, Ashara Dayne Lives, F/M, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, R Plus L Equals J, Sarella is Alleras
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:07:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22350817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceWall/pseuds/SpaceWall
Summary: Arthur Dayne realizes he can’t kill the man his sister loves, even when he has the man on the ground. Ashara Dayne is not going to allow her best friend’s child to die. Oberyn Martell is not allowing any more children to die in this war, especially those whose mothers his sister loved. Things spiral from there, really.--“Give me that,” Ashara snaps, and pries the child away from the other Northman, whose name she will later learn is Reed. To Arthur, she says, “when did he last eat?”Arthur tells her, and before Ashara’s modesty can get the better of her, she is pulling her left arm from its sleeve, allowing the front of her dress to drop, and holding the baby in place. There is a tense moment of nothing, and then he latches on and Ashara almost cries. Eddard and Arthur are both staring at her like a woman possessed. Reed’s eyes are firmly fixed on the floor.
Relationships: Arthur Dayne & Ashara Dayne, Arthur Dayne/Jaime Lannister, Ashara Dayne/Ned Stark, Elia Martell/Lyanna Stark/Rhaegar Targaryen, Jon Snow & Daenerys Targaryen, Oberyn Martell & Jon Snow
Comments: 59
Kudos: 500





	1. Ashara

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve chosen not to use warnings for spoilers, but you should know that nothing worse happens here than in canon and also I’m way less graphic than canon when things are bad. 
> 
> HOWEVER: Mentions of dead babies, of graphic murder, of rape/non-con and suicidal thoughts will occur, in the places you would expect (Elia, Aegon, Ramsay, Ashara, you know the drill). So if you’re not in a good space for discussion of the fucked up things, give her a miss today, yeah? Look after you. Take a nice shower & eat a cookie. 
> 
> ALSO: I’ve muddled the timeline a little because 1) it’s not actually possible in canon for Ashara’s baby to be Ned’s and I wanted that. And 2) because I think the shock value of the book ages for the younger generation does not outweigh how fucking creepy it is that GRRM wants us to think about naked 13 year olds. So, Show Ages, justified by the war being shorter for unexplained reasons, but otherwise as much book canon as I can manage.

Ashara’s son is born too small. The Septa says as much. She is her only companion, at this late stage in the war where both her brothers are fighting and her little sister is safe in the Water Gardens. It seems to have been a silent agreement between all her kin that Ashara will bear her bastard alone. There is a cook, a Septa, and Ashara herself alone within the walls of Starfall. The guards that remain, the elderly and infirm who could not fight in the pretender’s war, are sent home to their families. As if, perhaps, the unobserved child will be less of a stain on his mother’s honour. 

As it is, he lives three weeks. Then Ashara, the Septa, and the cook go out to where Starfall once had a godswood, an age earlier, and now has a slightly overgrown patch of trees. The cook digs the hole in front of one of the trees, and they bury the child beneath it, swaddled in cloth. This, at least, will give the family’s shame an air of mystery. She pays the cook handsomely, and sends him home. The Septa, she keeps on. Someone, after all, will have to tell her family what has become of her. This Septa will allow the secret burial of a bastard boy – she is not, some would say, a very good Septa – but she will let the mysterious death of Ashara Dayne, vanished into the sea, become public. Allyria will have some closure.

Only, before the plan can come to fruition, a party comes to Starfall under cover of night. Ashara meets them in the great hall, standing in her slippers and dressing gown. She feels too ill to dress. The Septa she dismisses back to bed. There is no need of supervision for a lady whose honour is well and truly ruined, and even if there was, this party has one member who would end all threat to it. 

Arthur throws back his hood, and his companions do the same, and Ashara wants to scream and rage at them. Or, well, at one of them in particular. 

“I hope they pick the worst of the Seven Hells for you,” she tells Eddard. Wisely, he says nothing. 

Arthur says, “Ash, are you alright?” 

Of course, he can’t know. “Do I look alright to you?”

He certainly doesn’t look alright to her. His white cloak is gone, and instead he wears a slightly-bloodstained rag. There’s a cut under his left eye that looks angry, though she can tell it isn’t that deep. There is a sadness that permeates every one of his motions, a mirror for how Ashara feels. Every part of her hurts. 

The third man, another Northman by the looks of him, is carrying a bundle of fabric. As if on cue, it starts crying, and Ashara’s breasts throb. Her son never ate enough, never cried enough either. But this child is crying. This child–

“Shh, Aemon,” Arthur says. 

“Jon,” both Northmen say, at the same time, as if the argument is an old one. How long can they have been on the road? Who last fed this baby? Where did they even get a baby?

“Give me that,” Ashara snaps, and pries the child away from the other Northman, whose name she will later learn is Reed. To Arthur, she says, “when did he last eat?”

Arthur tells her, and before Ashara’s modesty can get the better of her, she is pulling her left arm from its sleeve, allowing the front of her dress to drop, and holding the baby in place. There is a tense moment of nothing, and then he latches on and Ashara almost cries. Eddard and Arthur are both staring at her like a woman possessed. Reed’s eyes are firmly fixed on the floor. 

“Nothing you haven’t seen before.”

Eddard, tactfully, says nothing again, and Ashara is left to contemplate that this child has the same dark hair and pale complexion as their child, although his eyes are more Stark-grey than the dark purple-black that their own son had received. The child could be his, she supposes, but she doesn’t think Arthur would let Stark bring another bastard here. Not after putting one in her belly. So whose? Eddard’s brother was known for womanizing, but Ashara doesn’t think he ever came so far south as Starfall, and there is no good reason for his son to have been brought to her either. He has another brother, Ben-something, but he’s tucked away in the north. That only leaves one candidate, and it explains the broken-ness in Arthur’s expression, the correction of a Targaryen name into something bland and basically inoffensive. 

“Lyanna’s?” She asks, softly, knowing it to be true. 

“She didn’t make it.” Eddard’s voice is thick with grief. Some part of Ashara that isn’t consumed with icy anger wants to comfort him still. As it is, Arthur’s hand finds its way up to rest, half comfort, half threat, on his shoulder. 

“She went willingly. Rhaegar took her to wife by the old gods.” Perhaps Arthur has put his hand on Eddard to stop himself from shaking. He does not seem at all well. “The child is the rightful heir to the iron throne.”

The ravens have told her what happened to Elia, the bright and beautiful girl broken by Targaryen madness had her head smashed in by Lannister’s brute. They say that he raped her first, broke her son’s skull in front of her. That throne can only lead to death, especially for a newborn babe that cannot defend himself. Ashara cradles the child closer. 

“Not anymore,” she says, hoping her voice carries the finality she intends it to. “he’s a Sand, now. A sand star.” Jon is a good name. It makes her think of Connington, who danced with her even if his eyes were always on his prince. She thinks Rhaegar would like that, even if it isn’t the prophetic beauty he intended. Most people will think of Arryn, and though Ashara hates the man with every breath in her body it may, at least, keep the babe a little safer than Connington’s name would. “Jon Sand.”

Her child is buried under a weeping willow. But she was Elia’s handmaiden and she knows the way the princess’s eyes lingered on Lyanna Stark, the same way her husband’s did. She knows that Elia could have no more children of her body and so desperately had wanted another. She knows that Aegon’s brains coated the stones of King’s Landing. So she adjusts her grip slightly and says to Arthur, 

“Find rooms for our guests.”

As she turns to leave, Eddard calls, “where’s our son?”

She wishes he were dead in his sister’s place. “Under the Willow in the old godswood. Arthur can show you.”

The door clicks shut behind her before she can see Stark sink to his knees in shame and despair.

She hasn’t told Arthur to come to her, after settling in the northerners. But he comes anyways, as Jon has just fallen asleep in the child’s cot. He holds her as she bawls into his borrowed travelling cloak. They cuddle in her bed together, just as they did when they were small, and in whispers, she tells him about the child, and he tells her about the tower. 

He beat Eddard, as one might expect. But then he hadn’t known that the child would die, and he had found that he couldn’t kill the father of his nephew, or the uncle of his Prince. His brothers had already fallen, and he pulled Ned – he called him Ned familiarly, after weeks on the road – to his feet and into the tower. They just made it in time for him to say goodbye to Lyanna, and then she was gone. United in common cause, they had searched for what to do with the child. 

“It was my idea to bring him here,” confesses Arthur. “I’m sorry. He offered to take the babe back to Winterfell, but I thought that he would be caught out, coming back with me and Aemon – Jon. What kind of man stops to pick up his bastard while transporting a dangerous prisoner?”

If any man in Westeros could do it, Ned Stark is the one. She hates Arthur for not knowing this about him, but is to relieved to have him back in her arms to ever tell him so. Arthur is, perhaps, the only person left in all the world who loves her. The others will not forgive her shame, Elia is gone, Eddard has chosen to marry a fish, and the babe is beneath the willow. 

“The Septa and the Cook know my babe died,” she says, “there was a Maester for the birth, but he’ll remember the child being fair of skin like a Stark, and black of hair. The eyes have faded, but such a thing is not unusual.”

In the end, they leave the Cook be. He didn’t see who brought the new babe, after all. He will not think much of it, and dies two years later of pneumonia. But the Septa has seen more, knows more. Eddard kills her. He says that it is his duty, and none of them will argue with him in that. He, Arthur, and Reed carry the body into the mountains, a surer way of vanishing it than the sea, which often gives back unwanted gifts. Then Eddard and Reed depart, to fetch what remains of his sister from the Tower of Joy, and their lifelong con begins. 

The story they tell King Robert is this: When Eddard Stark and Howland Reed arrived with their men at the Tower of Joy, only two of the kingsguard remained. In the ensuing battle, everyone save they two were killed, and buried there. Lyanna Stark’s bones were shipped back to Winterfell. Ned said that she had been dead when they arrived, and he was unsure of how. No one thinks much more of it, and he returns home to his wife, to raise an ever-growing pack of sons and daughters. Howland Reed disappears into his wild marshes, and only occasional letters to his Lord reveal his continued life. 

As for Arthur Dayne, the story goes, he deserted when he was ordered to keep Lyanna Stark prisoner. Baratheon does not quite forgive him, but does not quite blame him either. He thinks him craven, but craven, Arthur tells Ashara, is better than treacherous. 

Their elder brother, it resolves, has been killed in one battle or another. Arthur is to be Lord of Starfall, since all his oaths are broken. Allyria, they decide, must be betrothed soon. Ashara’s shame must not be allowed to utterly ruin her. She is only nine, but an early betrothal will help build trust, and an early marriage ensure that she, unlike Ashara, is not a whore. They haven’t chosen where yet when they set themselves on the road to the Water Gardens to fetch her.

Ashara’s Bastard, Jon Sand, is eight months old. The night he arrived at his mother’s home, his father Eddard Stark knelt in a godswood that held no gods, and wept and prayed until the last of the stars had faded from the sky. With the fading of the Star of the Morning, his sister came upon Eddard, where he wept. She wept also, but not for him, not for his grief. She told him the child would have been called Rickard, had it lived. The name is not marked on any stone and in time it fades, rubbed away by Dorne’s shifting sands. Eddard will never speak again of what transpired that night. It is a secret he will take to his grave. Ashara chooses differently. 

Bringing Arthur to the Water Gardens, Ashara realizes about thirty seconds after they arrive, when Oberyn Martell slaps him across the face and demands a duel, is a terrible mistake. Arthur, looking pitiful, could probably defeat the Red Viper in single combat, but only if he tries, and Ashara doesn’t think he’ll try. He blames himself for Elia’s death at least as much as Oberyn does. 

Ashara, baby strapped to her back, crosses the space between them in two step and slaps him right back. Oberyn’s eyes are like Elia’s, and they bury themselves in her heart like fangs. 

“Don’t you dare,” she hisses at him. “Elia didn’t live so you could drink and duel yourself to death.”

He stinks of wine. A ways off, a pair of little girls toddle bravely through the water under the watchful eyes of an elder girl that Ashara will later learn is Obara Sand.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have left her.” His words are meant for both of them, and cut just as deep. He focuses back on Arthur and says, “duel me, or I kill you where you stand.” A knife slips into his hand, small and surely poisoned.

He means it, too. Oberyn is that sort of man, and he is very drunk. Ashara puts herself between them. If the Red Viper strikes her down – and receives Dawn through his heart in turn – then Arthur will raise Jon as a son. 

But this does not happen. Instead, Oberyn, after a moment’s hesitation, says, “not in front of the children.”

Ashara catches his arm before he can turn away and there, under the cloudless sun and between the white columns, she makes a choice that will change the world. “Sober up,” she says, “and I will tell you a secret that died with Elia.”

She almost thinks he is drunken enough to forget. They do not speak for many more days. Allyria tells long tales of her time with House Nymeros Martell and is delighted to hold baby Jon, for all that he is a bastard. Arthur has a long meeting with Prince Doran, and emerges unscathed, officially Lord Dayne. 

“You will need a child,” Ashara tells him. She does not say a wife. A bastard of Arthur’s would do just as well, in Dorne. He looks thoughtfully down at Jon. “No. He must never receive so much attention.”

She is right, of course. To be a legitimized Dayne would be to receive questions, and such things are the enemy of secrecy. 

“I don’t want a wife,” Arthur says, answering the question she has not asked. “Let Allyria have Starfall, and her children after her.”

They will skip Ashara’s inheritance. She is a ruined woman who will never wed. Eddard Stark has made her thus, and Jon has assured it.

“Did I say a wife? You will need a child, and someone to raise it with would not be amiss either. I will not be your nursemaid.” She has long suspected that her brother’s tastes run to men. It explains why Jon Connington would always dance with her. He certainly had never harboured any other fondness for any of Elia’s women. 

Arthur is silent a while, his indigo eyes very lonely. “Someday,” he says, finally, with a long look at Jon. 

He still thinks himself a member of the Kingsguard. And in a way, he is. He is the only guard their one, true king will ever have. But he cannot act like it. Not now, not ever. 

Oberyn comes to her a full week later, sober as stone but still with poison dripping from his fangs. His anger breaks him. All the other men in her life have come at night, Eddard, Arthur and Jon, but also the child whose name she cannot speak. That child came, too silent, at the Hour of the Wolf. Ashara, who will never now be a wolf, howled as if one was tearing into her, and squeezed the poor, dead Septa’s hand so tightly that a bone slipped out of place. Oberyn comes at the dawn. She is awake, having already fed Jon. Like his uncle, he is an incurable early riser. She yearns for the future when he will be old enough to swing a sword, and Arthur can work him with it, to free some of the restless energy that surely comes from his mother. But for now, he squirms in Oberyn’s arms. 

“I thought you wanted me sober,” he says, when Ashara pours a glass of wine. 

She sips. “I want you sober. But I’m not likely to fly into a drunken rage and bash Arthur’s brains out.”

As soon as she’s said it, and Oberyn has gone white as a Targaryen, she realizes the implication. Fortunately, Jon chooses this precise moment to grab a fistful of Oberyn’s hair – grown surprisingly long in the last year – and pull as hard as his little hands can. 

“Ah, you’ve killed me!” Oberyn cries dramatically, and makes a funny face at Jon. He doesn’t get much of a reaction, but that is to be expected, really. Jon isn’t much for strangers. 

“Set him down,” Ashara tells him. She mostly handed the boy to Oberyn because he’s a father too, and she thinks that if he thinks of Jon as a baby first, he will be less angry later. Dutifully, he carries Jon over to the rug that Ashara has ordered placed in the corner of the room, and sets him among a borrowed collection of dolls, fabric animals, and wooden swords. 

When Oberyn sits across from her again, she says, “I loved Elia as a sister, you know.”

For all his rage, Oberyn cannot claim to be the only person in Dorne who adored their Princess. “I know. That makes it worse.”

And of course it does. Her child was but a few weeks older than Jon, who was born perhaps a little early. They had been close to war when she had lain for the last time with Eddard, the time he had gotten her with a child. 

“Elia,” she keeps her voice very quiet. Even in Dorne, there are ears everywhere, “loved Rhaegar. But not only Rhaegar. And Rhaegar loved not only Elia.” Because she has spent too much of her life in the company of Targaryens and their wives, she says, “the dragon has three heads, Prince Oberyn.”

As one, they turn to look at the young king who is vigorously shaking a rattle that must have been pulled from somewhere belonging to the Martells. It is in the shape of their sigil, painted in their orange.

“Jon Sand,” Oberyn says, matching her quiet tone. 

“Arthur wanted to call him Aemon.” She thinks it was Arthur’s idea, anyways. “He says that Rhaegar married Lyanna in the northern fashion, before a heart tree.”

“He had a wife.”

“Yes. A wife who wanted nothing more than to find a way to give him the third child he so desperately wanted.” Oberyn will know this as well as she does. “And one who most certainly had no objection to dark curls and grey eyes.” 

It is incontrovertible that Lyanna Stark was a beautiful woman. Ashara was considered the same once, before Eddard ruined her. Unlike Ashara, Stark didn’t conduct herself in a courtly manner, as a noble and far-away figure. Elia and Rhaegar loved her instantly, Rhaegar for her beauty and the way she was in awe of him, Elia for the fire she carried despite her icy heritage. 

“I always wanted to love a roving knight,” she told Ashara once. “Now I have a knight as well as a prince.”

It is easier, for Ashara, to think of Jon as Elia’s son than to remember that much of the kingdom would not believe that Elia could have been his mother. But Oberyn remembers her as Ashara does, and he understands. He is on his knees in a heartbeat. 

“To Jon Targaryen, first of his Name, King of the Andals, the Rhonyar, and the First Men, I pledge my sword and my fealty.”

He looks up to Ashara for confirmation. It breaks her heart to say, “if you love him, let him live and die a bastard of House Dayne. You know as well as I do what this king does to Targaryen babies. Tell no one, least of all Doran.”

Doran is a schemer, at heart. He will not pass up a chance to have the rightful heir to the seven kingdoms handed to him on a silver platter. Oberyn is different. Love and vengeance rule him, but love is the stronger. No man who is not ruled best by love would take so many bastard daughters into his home. If he were as bloody as the men he despises, then he would not have stayed his hand when Ashara stood between him and Arthur. 

“Doran will be scheming with his aunt and uncle,” Oberyn says, “we could protect them together.”

Viserys is a horrid little boy, Ashara thinks. He always pulled Rhaenys’s hair when he thought nobody was looking.

“They are safer apart,” says Ashara. Her voice must sound desperate. “Don’t take him from me. Arthur can protect him.”

Oberyn, dusting off the knees of his trousers, takes her hand in his and kisses it. “My Lady Hand,” he says, “your wish is my command.”

Oh gods, the Hand of the King wipes his ass. It’s a vulgar joke, and in this case, it’s certainly true. She bursts into laughter as she hasn’t in months. It offends poor Oberyn terribly until she explains, and then he laughs as well, with the same desperation. They laugh until they weep, hold each other and cry for Elia until Jon, her beautiful, quiet Jon, calls out a noise that sounds like “mama,” and Ashara runs to sweep him up. 

Oberyn stands. He has no shame in his tears. “I will apologize to your brother,” he says, as he follows her to press a kiss to her forehead. “And I will not tell mine, not as long as my Lady Hand commands it.”

He is such a good man. This has all been about love for sisters, really, Eddard’s for Lyanna, Arthur’s for Ashara, and Ashara’s for Elia. It only makes sense that Oberyn should be one of them.

He pauses at the doorway. “My daughter Sarella is nearly of an age with your Jon, and Tyene not so much older. I should like it very much if our families could share some time before you leave.”  
In the end, she stays for months, Arthur, persuaded that the red viper is as fine a protector of their little prince as he is, flees back to Starfall to avoid Jon Arryn’s visiting. Ashara stays as he negotiates peace with Doran, a man just as deceitful as he is. This is the architect of Eddard’s wedding to the fish. She wants to look him in the eye while she imagines curses against his house. 

It is worth all of it when she curtsies before him at Oberyn’s side and follows his introduction of Obara, Nymeria, Tyene and Sarella with, “and my son, Jon Sand.” She and Oberyn will spend hours laughing at the look on his face as he gazes into Stark eyes. 

They celebrate Jon’s nameday on the day her child’s would have been, for simplicity’s sake. Oberyn complains that at this age, no celebration is needed, but presents Jon with a rattle in the shape of Dawn’s handle and a fat bracelet of polished wood beads to chew. He and his daughters join them to eat honey cake, which Sarella promptly smashes in Jon’s hair. That night, when they are all put to bed, Oberyn comes and sits with her in silence. They raise their glasses to all that never was, and all that never will be.

She takes Jon back to Starfall shortly after, and with Arthur and at her side they watch as he grows, turning two and three, four and five. Ravens and periodic visitors bring them news of the outside world. They still have no marriage for Allyria, but she hopes that Oberyn will help her. She considers looking north also, but the Starks, she thinks, have broken one too many of their vows to House Dayne. 

When Allyria is four and ten, and Jon is five, Oberyn travels north, without the complete compliment of daughters for a change, to sneak young Sarella into Oldtown dressed as a boy. She wants to see the library, and the best way to get in, Oberyn says, amusedly, is in such a fashion. The excuse for his travel is allegedly to participate in a Tourney, and so he takes Allyria also, to introduce her to courtly life. Jon is unspeakably jealous, but Ashara will not send him out into the world without her and Arthur, and they will not go out of Dorne as an oathbreaker and a whore.

The event is both a success and a failure. Allyria doesn’t find a betrothal, and Oberyn cripples the future Lord of Highgarden in a jousting accident. But the boy wakes, and he writes both Oberyn and Allyria faithfully – her family is too shamed for it to be a marriage, and a Tyrell really ought to marry a Reach girl anyways, but it is good for her to have a friend. Sarella adores Oldtown as promised, and vows to forge a Maester’s chain. Oberyn orders her to wait until she is grown, but he does so with a smile at his lips. The Viper’s daughter stealing wisdom from the Maesters is the greatest of tricks, and he is proud of her. 

Time rolls on. There is war in the Iron Isles. Eddard Stark has another child. Arthur, remembering a long-ago and much soured acquaintance with Barristan Selmy, decides to take Allyria to meet the Marcher Lords. It is the first time he has left Dorne since delivering Jon into Ashara’s arms all those years ago. He returns with a squire in the form of young Beric Dondarrion, and a promise that, in return for turning the boy into a man, they will have a husband for Allyria also. Arthur still does not have a wife, or any friend in the world, and Ashara is glad that this, at least, will give him a purpose apart from his king. 

When Jon is nine, Oberyn comes to visit again, and he and the eldest of his Sand Snakes take Beric, Allyria, the young snakes and Jon into the mountains as some sort of eccentric bonding exercise. It is the first time in as many years that Ashara has been without a child in her arms. It is the first time in three that she prays beneath the willow tree. In the end, it is a blessing they have gone. No sooner is the Red Viper out of sight than Jaime Lannister chooses to appear. Like Arthur, a lifetime before, he wears but a simple cloak. Ashara wants to scream at him, for failing Elia, for killing Aerys, for not having the decency to die like all of Arthur’s brothers. Or maybe for have stayed away these last nine years. She wants nothing less than a Lannister anywhere near Jon, but she isn’t blind to her brother’s loneliness. 

Arthur slaps the kingslayer across the face and insults him as Oberyn did to him so many years ago. But Cersei is not here to step between her brother and his attacker, and Ashara does not know if she would anyhow. Jaime calls him a coward. Arthur tells him that he wishes it was Jaime’s blood, not Elia’s, staining the stones of the Red Keep.

Ashara, who has been watching from the window of the tower, nearly trips down the stairs in her haste to stop them from coming to blows.

But instead, when she bursts into the courtyard, skirts hiked around her knees, Lannister is turning to walk away. The grief and shame in Arthur’s face breaks her. He has been so alone, for her sake, and Rhaegar and Elia’s, and Jon’s, for the sake of Jon himself more and more by the day. Despite his promises, Ashara knows, he will never take a wife or father a child. But he needs this. She thinks, perhaps, that Lannister might too. Otherwise, why come all this way?

“Jaime!” She calls to him by name because the informality feels right. Lannister freezes. She wants to ask him why he’s come, why he didn’t save Elia, why he killed his king. Instead, she says simply, “stay a while?”

He sneers. “And sup with the Stark pup?”

Jon’s tenth nameday is in but a few weeks. Only barely a pup. Oh. 

Oh seven, it’s been ten years since Elia died screaming, since Jaime Lannister put a sword through his king. Doubtless, this is why Oberyn has taken the occasion to retreat into the mountains with the last vestiges of his sister’s family. It doesn’t feel so long. But she was a girl then and is a woman now. She is a woman who knows well the stricken grief of being forever shamed for a single act. She is a woman who knows how to turn that shame into pride. She is proud of her son, of the fact that she carried a child and that she guards one still. She looks in Lannister’s shame and sees herself.

“He’s away with Prince Oberyn,” she says, “and you may as well be plain about it. He is a Sand pup. But it has been ten years since it ended, and more since it began. Stay and weep with us.”

The sneer intensifies. She’s got him on his back foot, and he knows it. “What do I have to weep for?”

Your innocence. Your honor. The honor others stopped seeing in you. But instead she says, “Elia.”

There’s nothing he can say to that. He lets Ashara drag him inside. 

It is not proper to allow the eldest son of Tywin Lannister to arrive without fanfare. But the Daynes are a dying and disreputable house, so they dine in private, Ashara, Arthur, and Jaime. For the first half of the meal, they are quiet. The silence between Arthur and Jaime speaks volumes without words. In the end, Ashara breaks it.

“Aerys Targaryen preferred raping his wife to having sex with her.” It was an open secret to the ladies of his court. The maids gossiped about the fact liberally.

Surprisingly, it is Arthur who says, “I know.” He swallows thickly, a sound Ashara has come to expect when they speak of that time. “I think he liked it when he knew we could hear her crying.”

Jaime stares at them like they’re both as mad as Aerys. Ashara is fiercely grateful that Arthur had understood her game, that he will play along. 

Arthur says, “he made us into his private thugs. I’ll never forgive him for that.” The words are intended for Jaime in particular.

“That is what the kingsguard is,” he protests, and the look Arthur gives when he realizes what this must mean about Robert Baratheon is one of such pity. He must sense it because he adds, “Rhaegar was the same. You may have run away instead of helping keep a highborn girl as his whore, but none of the others did.”

Of course, he was never Elia’s friend. He was never at the tower with Lyanna. He doesn’t know any of it. Some parts he can never know, but it is wrong to let this be Rhaegar’s memory. 

“She went with Rhaegar willingly. That wasn’t why I left.”

“It’s what you told King Robert.” The name is laced with loathing. If it weren’t for Elia, Ashara would almost pity the man. “And I doubt she was willing once her father was roasted like a boar.”

The stench had permeated the keep. Ashara can still remember it. It is one of her last memories of her happy times, just before Eddard wed another woman. That day, Aerys killed whatever chance Ashara might have had at a normal life. He killed Jaime’s too, that day or another.

He deserves to know. She can tell. But he is the brother of the Queen and her son will never be safe if Jaime knows. But she can come close. Something compels her to. 

“They took her,” Ashara says, “because she was supposed to give birth to Rhaegar’s daughter Visenya. To complete the set. Another wife for Aegon.”

His green eyes are cold. “And did she?”

“No.” That much is true, at least. “She was never born.”

Rhaegar’s fool prophecy was a lie. In the end, he was as mad as his father, even if he was not half so cruel.

They’ve paid a secret now, so Ashara feels justified for asking one in turn. “What was his final act? The thing he did that pushed you past the point of no return?”

She wonders if it was seconds before he died, or months or years earlier, when he took Jaime from his family and bound him to the kingsguard. She wonders if this has always been a prison for him. Ashara doesn’t remember much of Jaime from that time, but she thinks he arrived at court as a smiling, innocent boy.

For a breath, she thinks he will not answer. But then Arthur’s hand snakes across their small, private table. Gentle, he takes the knife from Jaime’s hand and weaves their fingers together. To Ashara’s shock, the kingslayer does not pull away. 

He says, “he planned to burn King’s Landing to the ground with wildfire.”

Arthur catches him as he slumps. The Daynes know all the constellations, and the one that Jaime resembles most in this moment is that of the runner who ran from Astapor to Meereen to tell of a great battle, and then collapsed the second the message had fallen from his lips. The Runner of Astapor, they call him, though it was Meereen where he was from, where he was buried. Those stars rise not so far from the Sword of the Morning, and Ashara thinks it fitting.

But unlike the runner, Jaime speaks again, mumbling into Arthur’s shoulder as Ashara leaves the room. “They weren’t supposed to hurt them,” he says, “they were supposed to be safe.”

Arthur kisses his golden brow, and Ashara closes the door behind her. Whatever other words pass between them are not for her ears. 

The next morning, Lannister rides away again, back to his duty and the throne, and Ashara does not think she has seen joy so cleanly on Arthur’s face since before he was a kingsguard. Jaime does not know the truth, but they all know a little more than before, and it is enough. Ashara is sure her brother will take no wife and father no children, but for the first time in ten years she thinks it doesn’t matter. 

When Oberyn Martell returns, she takes him to bed and orders him to put a babe in her belly. 

“I am not going to wed you,” he warns, hands already tracing down her naked body with more skill than Eddard had ever shown. 

“Obviously,” she says, because he is Oberyn Martell, and nobody goes to Oberyn for a trueborn son. He has only one son, and his name is Alleras Sand.

As anticipated, their daughter is born nine months later, hale and squalling, dark of flesh and hair like both her parents and unlike her mother’s son, and with the indigo eyes of a Dayne. Jon, who she fears will be jealous, who she fears she will love less with a child born of her body, assuages all her fears with the tender way he holds his little sister. The trouble with having a child with Oberyn is that many of the names she favours are already taken, but, by mutual consent, they settle on calling the girl Rhaenys. Around this time, Arthur starts teaching Jon about the Targaryens. They don’t mean for him to be one, exactly, but he deserves to know both the madness and the goodness of them. He makes Jon into a fine swordsman, a fine man in all respects. Oberyn drops by, and teaches him more dubious arts, but to always wield them with honour and grace. A man who has raised nine bastard daughters knows honour and the execution of duty with grace. 

It is for these traits that Ashara is not surprised when her son, barely six and ten, tells her that he intends to seek his fortune in Essos. She would stop him, but it is what bastards do, and Jon will never be, can never be, anything other than a bastard. He leaves without telling the Sand Snakes, save his little sister, because he knows that they, who have shown what bastards can be in Dorne, would think him a fool. Ashara lets this happen, because he knows what their father will do when he finds out that his king was wandering Essos. 

As he leaves, Arthur, who has worn the blade longer than Jon has been alive, presses Dawn into his hand. The Bastard of Starfall stares down at his ancestral blade in wonder. Arthur guides his hand closed around the hilt. 

“Don’t lose it,” he says, trying to make a joke. 

Jon nods solemnly. “I won’t, Uncle Arthur.”

By the time the Usurper is dead, and Eddard follows after, he is far, far away, sworn to the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea. When they meet, Jorah Mormont calls him, “the Sand Wolf, Ned Stark’s bastard.”

Jon says, with a smile, “Jon Sand, my Queen, the Sandstar of House Dayne.” The way he says the name is as if Sand is an honour, not a curse. It is laden with the indomitable bastards of House Martell, with the total love that he has received from Arthur and Ashara, and from Allyria who thinks him her nephew in truth. 

By the time he is holding a newborn dragon in his hands and it becomes evident that at least some of these names are lies, he thinks he knows enough of love not to doubt that Ashara is his mother.

As for the trueborn Daynes, they stay well out of the war of the Five Kings. Beric cannot, and Allyria returns to Starfall to wait for him. Under Arthur’s watchful eye, and the periodic influence of Oberyn Martell, he has become a very good swordsman indeed. The rumours from the Riverlands run wild. They say he was killed with a sword through his gut. They say he has turned into a bear and killed Amory Lorch in single combat. They say he rides with Thoros of Myr. They say Thoros of Myr is a sorcerer. They say Beric was killed with an arrow to the neck. They say he took an arm off Gregor Clegane, and was stabbed in the gut in turn. They talk and talk and though their words are but wind, they cut Allyria none the less. Beric never returns to her, and, in time, they begin to refer to her as the Widow Dondarrion.

Starfall receives other refugees. Barristan Selmy, stripped of the white, comes to Arthur. He is not so angry as Lannister, and does not forgive so easily. But he is desperate for closure, and Arthur is the only person who can give it to him. They receive a succession of Sand Snakes, and then Ellaria herself with the youngest four, who stay with them for the duration. Oberyn, she says, is occupied. 

As they wander across Essos with their dragons, Jon’s family begins cropping up. Obara reaches them first, in Qarth of all places, and bends her knee to the dragon queen. Then comes Nymeria, and then Tyene. Alleras drags himself from Oldtown after his sisters, and makes it to Jon’s side in Yunkai. He has only had time to forge a single link, which he ties around his wrist with string. And then comes Oberyn in Meereen, who finally is able to explain why all of this is happening and what it means.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obara: hey baby sister... wait a minute Where’s Jon
> 
> Ashara: in Essos
> 
> Obara, remembering that her adopted-brother-cousin is a dumb shit: fuck, when’s the next boat for Essos 
> 
> \--
> 
> Nymeria: Hey Lady Ash, have you seen Obara?
> 
> Ashara: she’s in Essos with Jon
> 
> Nymeria, remembering her sister is /not/ capable of mitigating Jon’s dumbness on her own: fuck, when’s the next boat for Essos
> 
> \--
> 
> Tyene: Hey–
> 
> Ashara: Essos, boat leaves in two days. 
> 
> \--
> 
> Alleras: 
> 
> Ashara: I’m sending you this raven in advance because the answer is Essos.


	2. Arthur/Jaime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arthur returns to King’s Landing after more than a decade away older, wiser, and equally skilled. Jaime is tired of watching honourable men die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arthur and Jaime share a chapter because I was too lazy to divy up the parts of the chapter I wanted in each other their POVs, so it kinda flows between them as is emotionally relevant.

With Oberyn in Essos, Prince Doran is forced to send Princess Arianne to the capital for Prince Joffrey’s wedding. She will not assume the offered seat on the Small Council, because Doran knows she is a liability, but she can at least go and offer courtesies as well as any of them. Oberyn can take the Small Council seat when he comes back from whatever wild goose chase he’s sent himself on. Doran worries about his daughter, who does not have Oberyn’s fangs to wield against the lions. In the end, he worries so much that she will need, he decides, the finest sword in Westeros at her side. He summons Lord Dayne, and gives him the task. Though Dawn is long gone and Doran looks almost longingly at where it once hung, the reputation of the Star of the Morning will give any Lannister assassins pause. This is how Arthur comes to King’s Landing, for the first time since he broke his vows. King Joffrey takes joy in mocking him, but the absence of Dawn sends whispers through the court. If Arthur Dayne has given it up, then there is another swordsman, equally good (he will be someday, but not yet), who has taken it up. They whisper that it is the Darkstar, whose reputation has grown these last years, or perhaps Beric Dondarrion. Only a man trained by Arthur Dayne could have taken an arm off the Mountain as it is alleged Dondarrion did. All these rumours disguise a dangerous truth.

Arthur finds the court much changed from when he was last there, and yet so many things are the same. The king is as mad, but he is not burning people yet. Arthur watches him carefully. The rumours are right that there is nothing of Robert in him, and none of Robert’s few good qualities either. There is nothing of Robert in any of the children, least of all Sweet Myrcella, who young Trystane already dotes on. Arthur thinks of Jaime’s anger at Robert, of what they witnessed between Aerys and Rhaella, and wonders how far he would go to protect his sister from the same fate. 

Then someone poisons the king, and Arthur is fiercely glad that he is here rather than Oberyn, who surely would have been accused of the deed himself. He cannot find it in himself to be angry at the death of the boy king, even knowing he is Jaime’s son. The child was a monster. Nor can he find it to be angry that Sansa Stark has escaped. If she killed him, then it was as much self-defence as anything. He knew Aerys, after all. A girl like Sansa Stark never could have been safe around Joffrey Waters any more than around Aerys, he thinks. A good knight would do something about all of this, help avenge the king or protect some innocent or something, but Arthur can’t think of what it should be. 

It is Jaime who guides him to his place. He loves his brother, and his hand is gone, and he knows that there is nobody else in King’s Landing who stands a chance of beating the Mountain that Rides. Even if Beric Dondarrion has given him a bad arm – the rumours were true, sort of, but he did not take the arm off completely – then he is still strong enough with the other to beat Jaime or Bronn or Brienne into paste the way he did Elia Martell. 

“Please,” Jaime says, not something he says often. He’s looking everywhere but across the table at Arthur. “Please.”

Arthur turns his face gently. His hair has always been pale, silver as a Targaryen’s, but the grey that is taking it over slowly darkens it some. His purple eyes, almost the colour of an evening sky and filled with all the world’s mysteries, are utterly unalike Cersei’s, and Jaime loves him more for it. He’s admired Arthur almost as long, and, despite the broken oaths that lie between them, Arthur has been far less disappointing. He tried to touch Cersei after he returned, and she had looked at his missing hand like he had failed her by losing it. When he first saw Arthur, his once-brother’s face had flitted with grief and anger, but Jaime suspects it was anger on his behalf, not against him. He has not once, here nor after being told about Aerys, flinched away from Jaime’s touch.

“Do you think Tyrion killed your son?” 

Arthur knows. Of course he knows. Maybe he’s always known. “No.”

He sighs, sounding tired, and then kisses Jaime softly on the forehead. It’s already a farewell. No man Arthur’s age could fight a mountain and win. Especially not without his blade. Arthur, who has kissed Jaime this way once before, bestows the touch like a gift, like a Septon offering a blessing. Unlike Cersei, he does not look at him like anything is absent.

“Bring me a sword,” he says, “and I will do what I can.”

In another world, Arthur Dayne could only be killed by a sword through his back. But this isn’t that world, and this blade isn’t Dawn. Jaime is keenly aware that this man can die. He is so, so sick of watching honourable men die. But he will risk it for Tyrion. Even before Arthur, Tyrion is his brother. He wishes now that he had not given Oathkeeper to Brienne, although he supposes Arthur could hardly have named it thus. 

The night before the duel, Jaime finds himself with the Dornish party. He knows that Cersei wants him. Maybe he should be with her. But Cersei will not die tomorrow, and it is very likely that he will watch Arthur die. He goes to Arthur to confess, when the other Dornishmen and the Princess leave. More than anyone else alive, Arthur knows his secrets. If he lives, Jaime may regret telling him, but if he dies, then the secrets will go nowhere. 

“He wasn’t as bad as Aerys,” he says. “He was usually too drunk to rape her, and he often lay with other women instead.” He says, “Joffrey was a monster. We knew that, we all knew that.” He says, “I pushed Brandon Stark – the little one – out a window because he saw us together.” He says, “Cersei told me to kill Sansa Stark. I sent Brienne to stop me. I think she’ll kill me when the time comes.” He says, “I think protecting her is the only noble thing I ever did.”

Arthur finally speaks. It’s almost like talking to Ilyn Payne, so rarely does he exercise the privilege. He says, “that’s not true.” Jaime waits, knowing he must have more to say. “You saved the life of every man, woman, and child in this city.” And then, “I can fight with both hands. I should have taught you.”

He’s sweet. Really, genuinely sweet. Jaime wonders how it’s taken him more than half his life to realize that Arthur is sweet as sugar, loyal as a Tully, and beautiful as – well, as a Dayne. He is no Targaryen, but his silver-grey hair is as beautiful as Cersei once thought Rhaegar would be, and his eyes wide and mesmerizing in their fantastic colour.

“If you win,” Jaime says, “I’ll do whatever you want.” He’s baffled to find that his words are true.

“If I lose,” says Arthur, “I only want you to do one thing. Go to Ashara – you must go in person – and ask her to tell you… to tell you what’s beneath the Starfall willow. She’ll know what I mean.”

It’s a cruel way to phrase it, Arthur knows, but to say ‘about Jon’ or ‘at the Tower’ or any other short phrase might easily be mistaken for a trick. This, they and Howland Reed are the only living who know. 

But even without those words, Jaime seems to know what this secret is about. He says, “they say the Sand Wolf rides with Daenerys Targaryen. That you gave him Dawn.”

Perhaps his position on the small council has earned him a finer class of rumours. “I didn’t know he meant to seek her out when I gave it to him.” 

For this first time in this dance that has been their relationship all these years, it is Jaime who takes his hand. He says, “I hope he does a better job protecting her than we did.”

Arthur thinks of Oberyn’s conspicuous absence, of all their disappearing Sand Snakes. He cannot speak to Daenerys, but he thinks that Jon will be one of the most protected men in Essos when all this is done.

“I will see vengeance done,” he says, but it feels hollow, really. Arthur has dedicated his life not to the pursuit of vengeance, but to the preservation of life. Jaime, in a twisted way, has done the same. 

“Don’t see vengeance done. Save an innocent man.” Save every innocent the Mountain will slaughter. The words cut to the very core of what Arthur has felt is his purpose, all these long years. Jaime could reach into his chest and play the strings in his heart as Rhaegar would a harp, and be no less close to Arthur’s soul.

“Is there such a thing as an innocent Lannister?”

“Yes,” Jaime says, surprised by how strongly he feels it, “there is.”

His memory fills with Tyrion as a boy, innocence in shattered pieces around him. He thinks of Myrcella and Tommen, who never asked for any of this. They’re all going to die because he, and Cersei, and Joffrey are monsters, and it isn’t fair at all.

They duel isn’t very long, all things considered. They both wear their plate, but Arthur, even all these years later, is faster than he has any right to be. He makes it look easy. As Jaime watches from the stands, Arthur’s blade flashes through the sunlight in clean, effective strokes, he dodges most of the blows and takes a couple across his heavy breastplate without falling. He brings the Mountain crumbling down, and takes his head. The Mountain’s blows have cracked several ribs. Jaime worries terribly, and Cersei leaves a mark in the shape of her hand against his cheek. They haven’t slept together since before Robert died, and it shows. So, against her wishes, against his father’s, he goes back to Arthur. 

He’s lying down looking sorry for himself with his whole chest covered in bandages. The Maester has left already, but, to Jaime’s significant surprise, Tyrion is there. He and Arthur both look up when Jaime enters the room. 

“Why is it that I’ve never met your blood brother?” Arthur says, charming through the pain. “He’s the best of you lot by far.”

It’s only Tyrion’s presence that stops him from kissing Arthur right there. The thought is a concerning one. “I knew House Dayne had a preference for bastards. I didn’t realize it also extended to dwarves.”

“And cripples,” Tyrion says cheerily, with a significant look at Jaime himself. He looks like shit, but being accused of killing the king will do that to you. Jaime knows from experience.

“Cersei is probably going to have you both killed.”

Arthur attempts to shrug and winces. Tyrion says, “you know, the Spider said the same. I hear Essos is lovely late in summer.”

Arthur says, “given the circumstances, it would probably be best for a member of House Lannister to come with me and bring the Mountain’s head to Doran. And perhaps to… keep an eye on Princess Myrcella.”

It’s the way they always operated with Aerys. Not forsaking duty, exactly, but finding a better duty. If only his father were so easily led. 

Arthur thinks Lord Tywin’s eyes are going to bulge clean from his head, when Arianne demands that Ser Jaime escort them back to Sunspear. She says it politely, leading as her father would, but it also doesn’t leave much room for argument.

He’s going to say no, of course, but Tywin Lannister is a pragmatist at heart, so Arthur says, softly, “I might not be the worst influence, in convincing an overly-noble boy to choose his family duty over his kingsguard oaths.” He does not intend to send Jaime back to his nephew-son, but not, perhaps, for the reasons Tywin hopes. He knows that Lord Lannister wants Jaime as heir to the Rock. The affair with Tyrion has made that more than evident. Arthur may yet make his that, but he will make other changes, first.

That decides him. They sail for Sunspear with Gregor Clegane’s head in a jar. It disgusts Arthur, but he suspects Oberyn won’t believe it unless he sees for himself. More surprisingly, they sail with not one but both of Tywin Lannister’s sons. Tyrion, at least, has the decency to look grateful. Jaime mostly stares wistfully until the last of King’s Landings tallest towers have faded from sight.

“I would rather my father not have his men track me easily.” 

In pursuit of this goal, they let him off at Tarth, where he will easily find a ship for Essos and nobody will expect him. Jaime watches the Sapphire waters disappear into the distance and says, “I should be out looking for her.”

“She would be less safe with you at her side.” Lord Tywin might leave a girl playing at being a knight be, but he will not offer the same courtesy to his eldest son. Arthur knows well what it is to leave one you love alone for their safety. It is all that kept him from following Jon to Essos. 

Speaking of Jon, he will have to tell Jaime about him, soon. Away from Cersei for the first time in many years, Arthur thinks he might be good enough to know. If the rumours Doran’s little runner-lizards bring him are true, then soon the world will know. The fact that he’s been seen flying with the Mother of Dragons herself is not subtle. Privately, he vows to leave the truth for when they reach Starfall. That was where Jaime told him why he killed Aerys, and it makes sense to close the circle at Starfall also, to tell the final secret that lies between the two of them. 

They present the head to Doran Martell, and Arthur tells him the truth as well, for good measure. He knows that Doran has been plotting to put a Targaryen back on the throne, one wed to his son, but a Targaryen raised in Dorne, with a sister by Doran’s own brother, is almost as good. Jon’s love for his adoptive family has always been faultless, and he has been loved deeply in turn by Martells and Sands as much as by Daynes. It is very likely, Arthur thinks, that someday Lady Rhaenys Dayne will rule in Starfall, elevated by her own brother the king, and it is a thought that pleases him. 

Though Doran is not pleased to see Ser Jaime, he cannot deny the joy it brings Myrcella, who is a faultless child. Another innocent Lannister, but at least safe in Dorne. One of the new brothers is there guarding her, a particularly unremarkable one, at least in comparison to those Arthur served with, and he pays the man no mind as he watches Jaime in the gardens with his bastard the same way he watched Oberyn and Ashara with theirs. He’s seen Jaime with children before, with Elia’s and with Viserys, and this sight reawakens the love he felt then, for Elia and Rhaenys, for little Aegon and for Jaime himself. Then, he was just a boy, but now he is a man and despite everything, he has retained something of his joy. And Arthur loves that too. They are old men, and weary, and Arthur wants him.

He kisses Jaime that night, drunk on his triumphant return, on the way Jaime’s left hand has become dextrous, these last weeks, on Doran’s wine. The last man he kissed was Oberyn, and that more than a year ago. He expects this to end badly. To his knowledge, Jaime has only ever wanted one person, a woman, fair as the sun, although Arthur thinks that it was not her beauty that seduced him. To his surprise, Jaime shoves him against the nearest wall and struggles to remove his belt one-handed. 

“Jaime,” he chokes, as the kingslayer drops to his knees. 

Once, a long time ago, they were in almost the same pose, and Arthur knighted a boy for his valour. Later that night, Arthur traces the ghost of a scar on a man’s shoulder and learns that he left it there, hand not as steady on Dawn as it ought to have been as he named Jaime a knight. When Jaime tells him this, he kisses it. He kisses all the scars on Jaime’s body, from all the battles and skirmishes. He knows he can’t undo that which hurts the most, but this will have to suffice.

In the end, he can’t wait for the poetry of Starfall. He whispers the truth into the ear of the man he loves. Jaime goes still beneath him, and Arthur realizes he may have made a terrible mistake. Jon is safe in Essos, after all, but Ashara is not. If Jaime goes back to Cersei, Arthur will have to kill him.

“You didn’t break your oaths,” Jaime says, with a chill.

He has spent years thinking they were the same, or nearly so. A coward and a kingslayer. Now he knows that Arthur has been the only true kingsguard in Westeros. 

Arthur forgave everything Jaime did a very long time ago. “I would have. I didn’t serve a king. I raised a Targaryen prince as a Dornish bastard.” He trails skilled fingers down Jaime’s stomach. “I’m breaking the spirit of them as we speak.”

“You saved Rhaegar’s son. I let my father’s men smash Aegon to a pulp against the stones. You wouldn’t have recognized the thing they hauled before Robert as anyone’s child, let alone Elia’s.”

Arthur hates Tywin Lannister more than anyone else in Westeros. If he had Oberyn’s skills, he might have poisoned the man as they left. “Look at me, Jaime.” He sits up, wrapping his thighs around Jaime’s torso. “I didn’t do it for the fucking oaths. I did it because Ashara and the Martells are my family. Because Rhaegar was my oldest friend and Elia was Ashara’s. I didn’t kill Ned Stark at the Tower of Joy because Ashara loved him, once. He could have chosen to take Jon to Robert, if not for the fact that Lyanna begged him to look after the boy. We did it for her and Elia, not for oaths made to Aerys. Even your worst critics will not fault the depth of your love for your family.” They would fault its expression, but that’s a different matter.

“My father hates me.” 

Nobody could hate Jaime as thoroughly as he hates himself. “Your father is furious because you stopped him from murdering your little brother. Frankly, you’ve demonstrated unworldly patience in not breathing a word against him, nor Cersei. But, as you told me, there are yet innocent Lannisters. Tyrion, Tommen, and Myrcella deserve your protection and love as much as Tywin and Cersei do.”

He’s crying. It isn’t pretty. “I should’ve gone to her. I should’ve saved her.”

Arthur lays on top of him, their sweaty bodies flush against one another. He wants to shield Jaime from all this world. As he’s said before and will say again, he tells Jaime, “We never should have left you alone. No man could have protected Elia and saved the city. Even if you had stopped the Mountain, how would you have freed her? Do you truly believe Robert Baratheon would not have taken the children’s heads regardless? I have heard rumour from Barristan of what he intended done to Rhaella’s young ones. Can you believe Elia would have allowed that to happen while there was yet breath in her body?”

Jaime does not say anything in response, but his arms come up to clasp tight around Arthur, and they fall asleep together without letting go. In the morning, Jaime agrees to come to Starfall, where he will be a prisoner in all but name, but at least his daughter will be safe. If Aegon the Conqueror comes again, the safest place to be is probably behind his beloved Uncle’s walls, and Jaime intends to ensure that Myrcella is there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think Jaime’s kinda OOC in this fic, but I also think that Arthur is kind of a Big Deal for him, and if Brienne could have such an impact on him as in canon, then someone who is equally is honourable but with the additional benefit of being someone Jaime has liked since the beginning ought to have a big impact too. 
> 
> A conversation that definitely happened sometime in this canon:  
> Ashara: I’m sorry you want /what/  
> Arthur: to keep all these Lannisters  
> Ashara: Are you six years old? Stop bringing home weird animals.   
> Arthur, kinda being a dick: hey last time I brought home a weird animal you raised it for sixteen years.   
> Ashara, long suffering: hey shut the fuck up


	3. Jon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon Sand becomes a Prince, learns his personal history, and finally goes north.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW/TW: Ramsay’s here, briefly and from Jon’s POV. Not much else of note this week I think.

By the time Uncle Oberyn arrives in Meereen, Jon has already figured out that someone has been lying to him for a very long time. As he told Daenerys, when they were feeding the dragons in Qarth, he’d always felt just a little out of place among the Daynes. There were always those rare, odd moments, when Mother touched the bark of the willow tree a little tenderly, when Uncle Arthur’s eyes clouded over, where he felt as if something was not quite right. It only got more odd after he turned ten, when Uncle Arthur began to teach him about the Targaryens. 

“Was my father as bad as they say?” Dany asked him then. It was not the first time she’s asked, and later, she asks Oberyn the same.

Jon said, “from everything I’ve heard? Likely worse.”

Oberyn says, “my Queen, your father as good as killed my sister. He was mad, and a fool, and if Rhaegar had deposed him years ago, it never would have come to this.”

As Uncle Oberyn explains the truth, Jon notes the careful way he tells it. He’s grown up knowing Oberyn, hearing the whispers about his murdered sister. He knows that Oberyn loved Elia as much as his children love each other. As much as Jon’s mother – as much as Lady Ashara – loves Uncle Arthur – Lord Dayne. So it is no surprise that he focuses on the way Elia felt, on the fact she would have been a mother to Jon as much as Lady Lyanna, as much as Rhaegar was a father. It’s a knife twisting in his throat. Not just a father he never knew, but two mothers. He’s never minded that Lord Stark left him in Dorne – the North sounds a cold and lonely place, compared to the beauty and family of Starfall – but this is rather different than that. These parents didn’t leave him. They died. All of them. By Baratheon, and by Lannister, and by the will of the gods, cruel as they can be. He is angry, and jealous, but when he grieves and wishes to be held, it is Lady Ashara he wishes for. It is Uncle Arthur he wishes were here to speak to, although Oberyn, who at least seems glad to count Jon a kinsman by this, rather than by Rhaenys, does not do a bad job giving them council.

They agree that Daenerys will be Queen. She will have nothing else, and it is too complicated to explain why Jon is not a bastard. 

“It does not always end well,” she says, “when Targaryens allow bastards to live.”

Jon thinks that Drogon might kill Rhaegal, but with Uncle Oberyn and his cousins here it does not seem likely that Daenerys would live long enough to kill him. 

Fortunately, the madness seems to clear from her eyes, and she continues, “but you might be my lord husband, and that would suffice, I think.”

They will never lie together, but Jon was raised a Dornish Bastard, by the shamed Ashara Dayne, by the Craven Kingsguard, and by the Red Viper. They wed, and they sleep apart. Jon suspects his wife is still pining after Daario, which he cannot in the least respect, but does not begrudge. He’s seen odder things than couples who knowingly lie with others. Besides, Jon, Daenerys says, will have to wed or at least bed another anyhow, to pass on their blood. They hold several councils to determine who. 

“Arianne,” Oberyn offers, “for Dorne’s loyalty.” 

But Arianne wants to rule in her own right, not be a brood mare, and Jon points out as much. Besides, the Prince Consort is already a Dornishman by his heritage, and, if Jon gets his way, the Hand of the Queen will be too. Concentrating too much on the Dornish, who are already their friends, risks alienating everyone else. They turn their minds to the other kingdoms. No Lannisters, no Greyjoys, they agree. The Starks, the Arryns and the Baratheons are traitors of the highest order, but installing one of them might show a certain good will, and Jon is half a Stark himself. 

“Stannis Baratheon wouldn’t know his cock from a sausage,” Oberyn says, “but he’s fair, by all accounts, and you might wed his daughter when she comes of age.”

He also possibly has Stark cousins who might prove useful if they are found alive. There are no Arryns left, save for a boy child, and the Tullys are almost equally few in number. The Freys rule the Riverlands now, but Jon says he will not wed the daughter of a man who kills those under guest right. That leaves, of the great houses of Westeros, only the Tyrells.

Oberyn knows them some, and Jon does too. His Lady Aunt – not really, of course, but in spirit – has been a friend to Willas Tyrell as long as Oberyn has. If Jon had not been there, a living testament to his mother’s shame, they might be wed by now. 

“The Tyrells are ambitious,” Oberyn says, “Lady Olenna especially. But not altogether bad people. Margaery was wed to Renly, and is to wed Joffrey, but Renly was fucking her brother and Joffrey is a bastard. She may not yet have legally been wedded and bedded by the time we take the throne. And the armies of Highgarden would not go amiss. Besides, they showed your father more loyalty than any of the rest.”

So they choose Margaery Tyrell, pending her family’s consent. But they cannot yet leave Meereen. Daenerys will not leave until the city is settled, and so they set to work. This is how Tyrion Lannister comes to them, weary and bruised from weeks on the road, and bearing a letter from Uncle Arthur to keep his head upon his shoulders. It is with his help that they finally set the city on the right path. The burden of ending slavery is one of the redistribution of wealth, of land, and of knowledge. Oberyn takes charge of the wealth part, uncovering plots, killing those responsible, and dividing up the land of those who already dead. In Meereen proper, there is little and less land, but there are the Pyramids, and those Jon divides, setting up boards to manage each, to fairly allocate housing in the city. Tyrion takes charge of knowledge, once they decide to trust him, and begins setting up schools, training institutes, across the city. 

When they leave Meereen, on the ships the Iron Fleet, it is Tyrion and Alleras they leave behind, along with many of the Unsullied. After all, Oberyn says, Westeros will not bow easily to an army of foreign eunuchs. The war must come from within. Tyrion, Daenerys admits grudgingly, will be a good regent for her, and Alleras, who has found a love for something in this strange and broken city, will keep him in line.

Jon hasn’t seen the shores of Westeros for what feels like lifetimes, when they take Dragonstone. Daenerys, he knows, feels a strong connection to the island where she was born, but he doesn’t. In Essos, he never felt lonely, but with his family so tantalizingly close, their absence is a sharp pain in his heart. He wants to thank his mother, for everything she’s done. He wants to give Dawn back to Uncle Arthur because he has a dragon now, and very rarely is a sword useful to him. Besides, he isn’t a Dayne, and he doesn’t deserve it. He wants to hold Rhaenys again, and tell her how big she’s gotten, and introduce her to Dany, because he knows that Dany will love her, because Dany loves children. But first, he has to save Dorne, and to save Dorne, he has to take the North. 

“It’s relatively simple,” Oberyn says. They are in Jon’s favourite room in Dragonstone, the map of Westeros spread out beneath them like they were on dragonback, flying impossibly close to the sun. “Dorne, in the modern era, cannot afford to fight the rest of the Seven Kingdoms. Ergo, we need to take some of them, or at least, remove them from play.”

Ser Jorah sets a model Kraken down with a solid thump over the iron isles. “The Ironborn are engaged in a vicious civil war. Various parties are reaving along the coasts, and as far inland as Winterfell and Oldtown. We can pick a winner, but sitting them on the throne would be difficult, and they ought to serve us before receiving that boon. Otherwise, it would be too costly, with too little reward. Let us leave them out of the picture, for now.” 

“The Vale has been unengaged with the wars,” Obara says, placing the Arryns atop the Eyrie. “There is no reason to think they will become a threat now. I say we ignore them as well, for the present.”

Oberyn picks up a flower, twiddling it delicately between his fingers. “Highgarden would be the ideal ally. They sit between the Westerlands and Dorne, and though their armies fought, their lands have remained largely untarnished. The issue is that two of their four children are currently in King’s Landing, and one is married to the bastard king.”

The way their war councils have always worked is that everyone has the opportunity to say a piece, and Daenerys and Jon mostly listen. Missandei says, “they must know he is a bastard? Or does that provide us an opportunity to break their alliance?”

Tyene gives her a wicked smile. “The easiest way to break their alliance would be to kill the king. If Myrcella were to inherit – as is her right – then they would have to turn to us for another chance to advance Margaery.”

“No,” Jon and Daenerys say, at the same time. Jon takes the chance of smiling at her, which she returns. He is always glad when Daenerys acts as a protector of innocents, even the children of those who have wronged her. Jon says, “he’s just a boy. If we are to poison anyone in King’s Landing, let it at least be someone who deserves a dishonourable death. Tywin Lannister, perhaps?”

There’s a general agreement, although Jon expects that they will not end up poisoning Lannister. He deserves a lawful death. This will only ever end with lawful deaths, no matter what Uncle Oberyn believes. 

“In that case,” Jorah says, “let us consider our next best option.” The flayed man is positioned in the North, with slightly more care than the kraken was. “Lord Tywin’s allies, the Boltons, are seated here in Winterfell. His bastard is married to Arya Stark.” A stag follows it. “Lord Stannis is here, on the wall. He’s been in the north for several months. We’re not sure what he’s planning, but we have no reason to believe he has a Stark. His presence there is what allowed us to take Dragonstone, and it also means that there are no trueblooded Baratheons to rally the Stormlands.”

Daenerys’s eyes are bright with possibility as she watches Jorah. Jon’s never been sure of their relationship, and at this point, he’s too afraid to ask. “And why is the fact that he lacks a Stark important to us? We do not want him to win the North.”

“Because,” Oberyn chimes in, with a significant look at Jon, “that means it is possible that we have the last male with Stark blood in all of Westeros.”

Jorah nods. “The Starks have ruled in the North longer than the Targaryens could have dreamed of, Khaleesi. And Prince Jon is the very image of the late Lord Eddard.”

“He was not raised in the North,” Obara argues, “a Northman is as a Northman does. Besides, if the Boltons have the Stark Girl, then she has the better claim.”

Jon fears she might be right. The only kingdoms he has set foot in are Dorne, the Reach, and the Stormlands, for Allyria’s wedding, and they are as far from the North as it is possible to get. And yet. His birth mother is of the North. In a kinder world, his mother Ashara would have been of the North also. 

Missandei reminds them, “Lord Tyrion did say it was not the real Stark girl, that she hasn’t been seen in many years. And if she is true, then why would she want to be in a family that betrayed hers? If rescued, she might bend the knee to the cousin that saved her.”

So, Jon flies North to make friends. He goes first to the wall, where Stannis Baratheon is King. He’s been there for months now, ruling over the gift. He’s disestablished the position of Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and has taken to the war – the True War – as his own calling. Jon learns all this in their first meeting, although he can scarcely believe any of it. Stannis is not pleased to have a jumped-up half-Targaryen land a dragon in his courtyard. But his daughter, Princess Shireen, is delighted about it, and he cannot, at least, fault that.

They dine together and Shireen, for once drawn from her shell by the presence of a dragon, asks a thousand questions. Seylse would stop her, but Stannis, seeing how endeared the Sand boy seems, allows it to continue. Later, in Stannis’s solar, they speak more plainly. 

“Eddard Stark entrusted me with the crown,” he says. “He agreed, as I do, that the madness in the Targaryen blood is not to be trusted.”

He expects offence, but the bastard says, “I was raised by Ser Arthur Dayne. He tells me that Aerys Targaryen deserved to die, and I believe him.” His eyes are all Stark. There is nothing of Rhaegar in him at all. “But I’ve also spoken to Tyrion Lannister. He tells me that Joffrey was mad and violent also, and he has less Targaryen blood than you do, Lord Stannis.”

He grits his teeth at the insult, but says nothing. He wishes Davos had come to the meeting, but Davos is at Eastwatch, and there is nothing that can be done about the fact now. They had not been expecting a Targaryen visit. 

They speak a while. Jon tells him plainly of their efforts at governance in Meereen, their successes and failures. Even he cannot deny that it is more experience at good governance than Robert accrued in a decade and a half of kingship. 

At the end of their meeting, Jon says, “Prince Oberyn Martell once told me that you were a just man, Lord Baratheon.” Stannis inclines his head at the compliment. “I see in the fact that you are still here, guarding the kingdom rather than seeking it as your birthright, that you are not only just but also dutiful.” He pauses, half for dramatic effect and half to take a sip of the water that is Stannis’s preferred drink. “Regardless on your feelings about the legitimacy of Prince Rhaegar’s marriage to my lady mother, it is lawful for Daenerys, as the last remaining legitimate Targaryen in my stead, to legitimize me accordingly. Ergo, by this and by my marriage to Daenerys, I am Prince Consort Jon Targaryen, your rightful liege.”

Sometimes, Stannis wishes Renly had lived in his place. He suspects Renly would not be nearly so pained by all of this. As it is, he says, “and what are you asking of me, Prince Jon?”

“Be the Lord of Storm’s End,” Jon says, as if it’s all so simple, “Lord Paramount of the Stormlands. Stop burning followers of the Seven. Come to an arrangement as the North has. The Old Gods and the New exist peacefully here, Lord Mormont, the Queen’s Master of Coin tells me. Arrange a profitable marriage for your daughter, or we can legitimize one of your brother’s bastards as your heir if you prefer.”

Storm’s End is tempting. An end to the fighting is tempting. “That’s the reward. What do you ask me to pay for it?”

If Melisandre has taught him anything, it is that all magic comes with a price. The prince says, “your men say there’s something terrible past the wall. Is that true?”

Stannis has yet to see them, but Davos has, and Melisandre agrees. Anything that makes the two of them agree must be true. “Yes.”

And Jon says, “then fight it, until I can bring an army to help.”

He ought to bargain more. “We need dragonglass weapons. There’s a great store of it beneath Dragonstone. I want as much as you can bring me.”

He doesn’t kneel. Instead, Jon cuts both their palms and they swear to their respective gods to uphold their ends of the bargain.

Then, having ended one war before it begins, he flies south. 

On Stannis’s advice, he arranges a parlay with the bastard of the Dreadfort. “You must always give them a chance to choose a just outcome,” he says, thinking of a long-ago hunger and a smuggler carrying his fingertips around his neck. “Sometimes, they will say yes.”

Ramsay Snow does not say yes. He’s brought his wife to the parlay, and insists on calling her Arya Stark for the duration. But her eyes are all wrong. Jon has never met another Stark before, but has been told that they should look like him, and this girl does not have his eyes. And more, although Rhaegal hates Snow on sight, he doesn’t seem to mind the girl. Dragons are not very good judges of character, but Rhaegal is learning. If the girl was there by choice, Jon doesn’t think she would be afraid enough for Rhaegal to smell it. Even Jon thinks he can taste her fear, lying thick in the air. 

To Snow, he says, “you have come to parlay with me. For that, you will earn your free passage, for now. Bend the knee to Queen Daenerys, and renounce your ill-gotten claim to the North, and you and your men alike can keep your heads.” He adds, to the girl, “I don’t know who you are, but if you’d like to be free, Queen Daenerys has freed many women, from all sorts of bonds. You may come with me now or later.”

Snow says, “are you threatening to steal my wife, Sand?”

He says the bastard name as if it’s an insult. Well, Jon supposes that many bastards find it thus, but Obara would have his ears if she heard Jon say it like that. “I’m threatening nothing,” Jon tells him pleasantly, “but what Rhaegal decides to do is… not entirely up to me.”

As if on cue, Rhaegal roars. They all cower back, the bastard and the girl included. Jon mounts up. It seems further every time he climbs onto Rhaegal. 

“Consider my offers,” he says to them both. “Dragons, in general, are not known for their patience.”

He does not want to raze Winterfell, but Torrhen Stark knelt for three dragons, and he ruled a stronger and more unified kingdom than the Boltons do. Jon thinks, rather ambitiously, that he can make Roose Bolton kneel with one. 

His last stop, before he must turn and war with the Boltons, is Deepwood Motte, where Asha Greyjoy sits. This castle is almost entirely wooden, and Rhaegal could destroy it with a single breath. Unlike the Boltons, Asha Greyjoy – based on his interactions with Victarion Greyjoy, at any rate – would probably respond well to displays of strength. So he and Rhaegal land in the middle of their fortifications. Jon has to lie flat on Rhaegal’s back to keep from being immediately turned into a pincushion. Rhaegal ruffles his neck and huffs angry as the arrows, which, aimed for Jon rather than trying the penetrate his scales, largely miss widely. 

Loud as he can, he yells, “I’ve come to bargain with Asha Greyjoy, as Prince Consort to Queen Daenerys of Meereen, the Unburnt, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms.”

Rhaegal roars. The arrows stop. A woman’s voice, accented just as Victarion’s was, calls, “Prince Consort, is it?”

Jon debates sitting up, but decides against it for the moment. “Queen Daenerys has sent me to take back the north. As the son of Lyanna Stark, possibly the last living heir of House Stark, it is my birthright.”

“Son of Lyanna Stark? Now this is a story I have to hear.” That’s a different voice, male, and with a different accent too. Jon is forced to sit up to look at the speaker. Beside the only woman of the bunch, who must be Asha Greyjoy, is a worn, grey haired man wearing the red and blue of house Tully. 

“Brynden Tully,” he names himself. 

Well, that changes things. Even a Dornish Bastard has heard of the Blackfish. Or, well, one who’s the nephew of the Star of the Morning, anyways. Jon grew up on Uncle Arthur’s stories of all the knights and lords he once knew. 

He slides down Rhaegal, hoping the presence of the dragon and the Blackfish will be enough to keep him from being filled with arrows. The shots that missed him litter the ground, breaking beneath his feet. He offers the proper courtesies to each of them. 

“Lord Tully. Lady Greyjoy.”

“My nephew is still Lord Tully,” the Blackfish says, “unless the Lannisters have finally separated his head from his shoulders.” He says the words as if he is trying to pretend that they do not hurt, and Jon imagines if he were a prisoner and Uncle Oberyn were here surrounded by enemies, it might sound much the same.

Greyjoy also disagrees. “I am not a Lady.”

Jon tries to smile as though he is a foolish boy uneducated in the ways of the North. “A mark of respect to you both. We had last heard that Ser Brynden was dead, and believed the Tully line largely extinguished. And as for you, Asha Greyjoy. Well, let me be the first to bring word of the death of Victarion Greyjoy, and the capture of his fleet.”

That gets her to smile. There’s a cruelty to it not unlike the other Ironborn he’s met, but she seems calmer, more patient. That probably makes her more dangerous. 

“I don’t believe you’ve introduced yourself,” the Blackfish says, “beyond your claim to Lyanna Stark.”

So, Jon does. They both stare. “You’re the Sand Wolf?” the Blackfish demands. “Ashara Dayne’s bastard?”

Sometimes, he wishes nobody had ever thought to give him that name. “The Daynes kept me in secret. Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, was guarding Lady Lyanna when I was born. Lord Stark, with his council and the aid of a Northman called Reed, brought me to Lady Ashara. She and Lord Stark agreed to pretend I was their bastard. They never would have ended that pretence if Queen Daenerys had not hatched dragons, which recognized me as their blood.”

It’s a concise summery, the bare bones of the emotional saga Oberyn spun for him. Greyjoy snorts in disbelief. 

The Blackfish’s brow furrows. “Howland Reed? Lord of Greywater Watch?”

Reed is a name with no currency in the South. Jon had never heard it until Oberyn had told him, and it has not come up since in all their tactical meetings. It hadn’t even occurred to him that the man might still be alive after all these wars. “I assume so.”

Asha keeps her frustration internal. She will not allow a baseborn boy, even one that’s half dragon and half wolf, to trod over her. “Why are you here, Sand? Do you mean to begin taking the North with the easiest prize? Well, it may be hard to kill a dragon, but it is easy to kill a dragon prince.”

All the bows are trained on him. Jon raises his hands, showing that he is not holding Dawn’s hilt. The Blackfish eyes the sword curiously. Jon says, “I mean to take the North for myself. But I do not mean to take the Iron Isles. Queen Daenerys may have ships, but there are currently no Ironborn to command them. She would look favourably upon an experienced commander who would swear allegiance to her. The current King, Euron Greyjoy, has been sentenced to die for his attempt to bind Queen Daenerys’s dragons.”

Now that was worth her attention. “And how, exactly, am I to reach the Queen?”

Jon is glad he’d already raised this course of action with Stannis. “If you and your men can reach the wall, Lord Baratheon has offered you passage along its course to Eastwatch, provided you offer up any prisoners you might have to the watch, and allow any of your men who have the inclination to join his non-watch forces there.”

Neither of them thought the outcome likely, but people trust easier in deals that have conditions. Grey asks, “and if I have no prisoners?”

Jon says, “then try not to wear on Lord Baratheon’s patience.”

This deal they seal with blood, as Jon had with Stannis. Rather unintentionally, he has begun a tradition that will outlast him. Thereafter, the Seven Kingdoms, though they will cease to mar their flesh, always swear oaths from two sides. It is the beginning of a strange and beautiful future. 

The Blackfish, who has escaped the deaths of his kin, for now, agrees to go to the Wall. There, he will rule over Stannis’s garrison at Stonedoor. He believes, quite completely, that Jon Sand is the son of Lyanna Stark. When people ask him why he was so quick to support Sand, before the evidence, Tully will say wearily, “Arthur Dayne is no craven, and no fool. He wouldn’t give Dawn to a liar.”

He’s right, of course. A strange providence brought him north, further and further until he was surrounded only by enemies with Asha Greyjoy the least terrible of the lot. They forged a pact to kill the Boltons. Now, with a dragon before him, Brynden is keenly aware that the fire and blood he promised to those who betrayed his kin, who stole his niece, will come. He and Asha together whisper in Jon Sand’s ear. Asha speaks of her broken brother, a traitor to his kin. Reaver, the massive white wolf that followed Theon and now stays with her, likes the half-dragon instantly. That should be proof enough that he is a Stark. Brynden tells of broken guest rite, of flayed men. He confirms that Arya Stark has not been seen in years, and, more critically, that her eyes are grey. Jon heeds their council, scratches the wolf behind the ears, which it allows – Asha has never seen such a thing, it usually bites everyone except her and Theon – and takes off on Rhaegal. 

It is said that Greywater Watch is unfindable by ravens. He hopes that dragons will have better luck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jon Snow, a man who’s never met Arya Stark, or any Stark except himself: no fucking way this kid is my cousin, her eyes are all wrong. 
> 
> Amazingly, he’s right, but imagine if he’d met Sansa first. Or Robb, or anyone except for “Arya”, really.


	4. Daenerys

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daenerys meets her goodmother, the incomparable Lady Ashara Dayne. She also meets the man who killed her father. It’s a very interesting visit to Starfall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW/TW: mentions of rape/non-con,

While Jon is taking the North and, hopefully, solving the problems of Stannis Baratheon and the Iron Isles both, Daenerys has what she hopes is the easier of the two tasks. She will begin on the South. First in Dorne, where her primary task will be to remind them what dragons look like, and then the same in the Reach, to a very different end. If she is lucky, she will win houses there to her side also and broker her husband’s marriage to another woman. Meanwhile, Prince Oberyn will consolidate their power on Dragonstone, and, hopefully, convince House Velaryon to their side. Daenerys suspects that, of their three tasks, this will be the easiest. Jon’s is the most difficult, by far, but Daenerys, when she lands at Starfall, pities herself just as much.

There are very few women in this world who meet their goodmother as they are, technically, invading her country. Daenerys, who has been wedded, and a mother herself, has never had a mother, good or otherwise. The idea of meeting Ashara Dayne, who cast away her reputation for the bastard of her best friend’s husband, is nothing short of terrifying. Daenerys can’t begin to imagine loving someone else’s child that much. Of course, she has children that are not of her body, but that is a rather different matter and they have always been her own.

There are more people at Starfall than Jon had described to her. She tries to name them, as they stand in a line before her and Drogon. Surely that is Lady Ashara, black hair not yet silvering, reminding Daenerys that she was not much older when Jon was born than Daenerys is now. Her face is lightly lined, both by grimaces and by laughter. Her purple eyes watch Daenerys warily. Beside her is her brother Ser Arthur, his hair silver all over, darkening into grey at the roots. Daenerys wonders if she will look the same if she lives to his age. A younger woman with the same purple eyes – Lady Allyria, by process of elimination – stands silent at their other side, holding tightly to the hand of a child that can only be Jon and the Snakes’ sister, Rhaenys. There are others there, but it is the girl the Daenerys decides to address first. She knows that, of all his kin, it is Rhaenys whom Jon has wondered of most often. The age she is now is one where things change quickly. He fears he will be forgotten. 

“Hello,” she says, kneeling to look the girl in the eyes. She cannot wear skirts riding Drogon as heavily as she has been, and so she can kneel without fear of ruining good fabric. “Are you Rhaenys?”

She nods shyly. Daenarys takes a silk ribbon from her pocket and hands it to the girl. “Your brother Jon wanted me to give this to you, and to tell you that he says ‘hello’, and that he loves you very much.” Jon carried the insignificant trinket all the way from Qarth, worrying it nervously between his fingers when it had seemed they might never make it home. Oberyn has surely brought her gifts of greater value, but nothing with as much love as Daenerys’s impoverished bastard husband had spent on that ribbon.

She blushes fiercely, whispers, “thank you,” and looks at the ground. 

“Where is Jon?” Lady Ashara asks. She does not seem softened by this gesture of affection. 

To business, then. Daenerys scans the faces of the other visitors. Prince Doran mentioned that his younger son was here, and he must be the Dornish boy standing slightly in front of a thin, blonde girl. His betrothed, presumably, the bastard-Princess Myrcella. Daenerys wished she could remember the name for crownlands bastards. There is a man in a white cloak beside her, hand on his sword. 

At Lady Ashara’s other side is a dornishwoman who must be Oberyn’s paramour, Ellaria Sand. Four other children surround her, ranging in age. The eldest, the noted Lady Lance, watches Daenerys in the same dangerous way her elder sisters and Alleras do. Behind the children is another man, old and white haired, but still armed. Daenerys will learn him later to be Barristan Selmy. 

The last of the party, she doesn’t notice right away because he’s hiding behind Lord Dayne, but he’s as fair as Princess Myrcella, golden, with a sword to be drawn by his left hand and his right sleeve pinned closed. As Daenerys’s eyes fall on him, the Lord of Starfall’s left hand goes to the hilt of his sword, and his right grabs that of the stranger fiercely. The man looks at him in open shock. 

“Jon is…” Daenerys doesn’t want to reveal their plan to all these people. “On business elsewhere. I came to bring news to Lord Dayne, and the Ladies Ashara and Allyria, and to bring courtisies to my goodmother, if Lady Ashara would honour me thus. Prince Trystane, I also bring word from your father. Given the current situation, he asks that you remain here at Starfall with the Lord Dayne.”

Lady Ashara seems to accept this. “When we saw the dragon, we thought it would be Jon, but we are glad to see you too.” She crosses the space between them in two steps and embraces Daenerys fiercely. “Your mother was a good woman, even if Aerys was horrid. I’m glad you’re well.”

Daenerys had heard much about her father, but so little about her mother. “Was she?”

“Yes,” Lord Dayne says confidently, at the same time as the man behind him begins to speak. “Aerys broke her before the end.”

They aren’t lying to comfort her, at least. Lord Dayne gives his friend a warning glance. Daenerys fixes her eyes plainly on him. “Tell me more.”

He opens his mouth, sees Dayne looking pointedly at young Rhaenys, and closes it again. Lady Ashara, drawing away politely, hands folded, says, “perhaps later, your majesty? Will you be spending the night here? I can have an animal of your choice slaughtered for your dragon.”

“Drogon,” she says, “and he’ll prefer it alive.”

They’re trying to distract her from asking about the blond man. Daenerys notices it as soon as they go inside, and she is surrounded by the trueblooded Daynes and bastard Martells, all speaking to her eagerly. Prince Trystane escorts his betrothed – his hostage – away, with her guard and the blond man. The others all return for dinner, but he doesn’t. Whenever Daenerys opens he mouth to ask about him, someone changes the topic. It’s a concerted, conspiratorial effort. Arthur Dayne held his hand. He’s loved here, and they think her a threat to him. 

Jon hasn’t warned her of this, and there’s really only one man it can be. 

The servants, seeming terrified of her, point her in the direction of his chambers. She finds that they’re surprisingly small, and that it is Lord Dayne, not Jaime Lannister, sitting on the bed. 

“I assumed you would figure it out,” he tells her plainly. His sword rests on his lap. “We really were expecting Jon you see. He would have… understood why Jaime is here. Jon is one of the least vengeful people I’ve ever met, for all Oberyn’s efforts to sway him otherwise. Even when he believed Eddard Stark had dishonoured his mother, he was never bitter against Stark’s trueborn children, against his wife. Part of that is Ashara, of course. She never let her feeling show. But for that, and for the fact I raised him knowing what Aerys was, he never would have been a danger to Jaime.”

“But I am,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Why shouldn’t I be? He killed my father.”

For a moment, he is still. Then he places his sword down on the bed, and folds his hands. “Kingsguards,” he says, “are supposed to be the best knights in the kingdom. Some of them have been. But the reality of the position is that you are the king’s personal army, as honorable as a sellsword. Take no wife, father no children, and ask no questions. We all find our ways to deal with that. I followed your brother Rhaegar around, imagining my oaths were to him. Jaime was never given that sort of freedom. He was taken into our order as a hostage against his father’s good behavior. He was supposed to be a bad kingsguard.

“But the truth is that he was the best of us. He was the only one of us who was still awake to what we were seeing every day in King’s Landing. That meant that it hurt him every time Aerys did something terrible. He burned men alive, strangled children in front of their fathers, ordered the executions of innocents without cause or trial. And that was only the things he did to House Stark. What Jaime was about to tell you earlier is that Aerys raped her. That he preferred it when she was not willing.”

She feels sick. An innocent seeing death for the first time once more. Only then, it had been Dothraki savages, in her eyes, and now it is her own father. A part of her has always imagined him like Viserys. Cruel, and petty, constrained within certain bounds. But this…

And then he delivers the most devastating news of all. “Jaime killed him because he intended to burn the entire city of King’s Landing to the ground with wildfire, killing everyone inside. He had already given the order when Jaime killed him. When I was last in the city, I tracked down one of the secret stores myself. That story is true.”

She wants to scream. She wants Jon and Missandei and Alleras and Tyrion here to advise her, because they are the least vengeful of her friends and she knows it. She wants Jorah and Nymeria and Grey Worm here to assure her that she is of sound mind, and Oberyn, Obara, and Tyene to remind her to accept nothing less than victory. As it is, she has only herself to decide whether the kingslayer shall live or die. 

Die, the voice in her heart whispers. Die, die, die. 

Why? The voice in her head calls back. It sounds distressingly like Jon. Jon never liked the vicious justice of the Dothraki, and this is the man who raised him thus. If Lord Dayne says Jon is least vengeful, then that can only be because he has not met himself. Protecting a kingslayer and that king’s heir in the same breath? That is madness, surely. Unless… 

“Do you love him?” She asks, abruptly. She knows the touch of a woman’s lips herself. She knows Alleras, who has changed her idea of what men and women are. It is not such an odd idea. “I mean, love him.”

He is already sitting still, but the stillness tightens. “When we first lay together, I told Jaime who Jon is. He cried for your goodsister. I’ve only seen him weep three times, and all three were for Elia. He also fathered all three of his sister’s children and pushed young Brandon Stark out a window for seeing them together. He’s the most complicated man in Westeros.”

Daenerys has freed the world’s oldest slave cities, and yet the husband she loved more than life itself had kept many slaves. Jorah, her oldest friend, sold people. She thinks that sometimes knowing someone is complicated is a part of loving them. This, she learned not from Jon, who loves completely and without reserve, but from Oberyn, who loves a boy who, though he believes Elia consented to being shamed for, he can never be fully sure of. And yet his love for Jon is dangerously strong. Like Jon, Oberyn knows no boundaries, no distance is too far for his family. But unlike Jon, he is older and wiser. He is the one she speaks to of Viserys, her brother who sold her, because she knows he will be angry on her behalf, and yet sad, because there should not be such strife in blood.

“If I let him live,” Daenerys says, “what will he do next?”

“I don’t know,” Dayne says in turn, “but if you asked him to take his remaining children and leave Westeros, he would do so without hesitation.”

She could send them to his brother in Meereen, but that wouldn’t solve her need for a Warden of the West. “And if I asked him to stand and fight for his Queen?”

“If you asked him to fight for his Queen,” Dayne says, “you might remember that the Queen Regent is his sister. You would kill him for being a kingslayer and as him to become a kinslayer in the same breath.”

He’s right. He’s too much like Jon. Damn the both of them for dragging her into this world where justice is so hard. It was easier when Drogo was pouring liquid gold on Viserys’s head. An ironic justice that she’d loved, that she’d wanted to replicate across her world, if Jon hadn’t cautioned her otherwise. Well, if he is going to be so like Jon, so fiercely compassionate, then he shall have to do his job too and advise her. 

“And what would you have me ask of him?”

Dayne says, “The greater part of me wants to ask you to leave him here with me. We have defied his father already in his staying so long, although they believe the purpose is so that he might wed Lady Ashara when released from his vows, rather than because her brother does not wish to part from him. But that is a selfish part of me, I know. So I say instead, whatever you do, ask him to protect, not to destroy. Jaime has always wanted to protect.”

If only she could afford to send him to Meereen. It would be much easier that way. But she needs a Lannister at her side, and she can’t let this one get his paws on the delicate situation that is Slaver’s Bay. Perhaps… Tyrion has told them how to take Casterly Rock. If she were to take his ancestral home and give it back, he might hold it for her. She could send Lord Dayne to keep him loyal. 

As she stands to leave him, she says, “Prince Oberyn wanted me to tell you he’s grateful, but jealous.”

Dayne smiles sadly. “He would be. I killed the man who raped and killed his sister. Well, you know Oberyn. If you see him before I do, you can tell him that we seek justice, not merely vengeance.”

It’s a distinction Daenerys will force to drive her for the rest of her life. She will give Lannister the Westerlands, the title, partly because she knows he does not want them. That is a punishment, though it does not look like one from the outside. As a reward for loyalty, she intends to give him his children. That is the deal they strike that night at Starfall, when he kneels before her and describes the truth of her father’s death in his own words. His children will lose their names, but keep their heads. His father, for the death of Elia Martell and her children, will lose his head. Cersei, they agree, will stand trial. It will be justice, as best they can make it. Even standing at the edge of the world, staring into all-consuming whiteness, she will think of justice not vengeance. Lannister has come too, to act as a protector in whatever way he can, standing at Dayne’s side in the frostbitten wasteland. Better to die forgotten against the eternal cold than to live a Queen of Ashes, she will think to herself. She steels her heart, grips Jon’s hand in hers, and prays for the dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing Dany’s POV in this AU is so much fun, honestly. This version of her character, who has Oberyn’s viciousness and Jon’s empathy, is really, really interesting to me. Also she’s a bit of an unreliable narrator here, in some of her perceptions of other people (she thinks Tyrion is /not/ vengeful) but that makes it more fun!!
> 
> Also I feel like this conversation probably happened at some point:
> 
> Dany: so isn’t it crazy that your uncle is basically married to the guy who murdered my dad
> 
> Jon, who knows nothing regardless of the many years Oberyn tried to spend drilling common sense into his head: I’m sorry they’re what
> 
> Dany, a woman who has eyes: literally how are you this brilliant and this dumb


	5. Sansa

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW/TW: implied/referenced canonical physical and sexual assault.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I fucking love Sansa Stark lemme tell you she’s great. This story was actually supposed to end with Jon but I blame Sansa for making me keep going I love her.

Alayne watches the war from the relative safety of the Eyrie. It is often Dark Wings, Dark Words. The dead walk again. Arya – somehow found, how, why? – in the clutches of the bastard who betrayed Robb. The Freys, with Lord Tywin’s help, subduing the Riverlands. But then the tide begins to turn. 

The Greywater Letter, they call it, in the history books. There’s a thousand copies made, sent to every great house, small house and whorehouse in Westeros, it seems, and they all carry the signature of Lord Howland Reed. Jon Sand the Bastard of Starfall, they say, is truly Jon Targaryen, son of Lyanna Stark. They say Eddard Stark gave up his pride to protect his family, gave up his sister’s only son to protect the boy. Sansa believes them. She believes sooner that there is another Targaryen in the world than that her father would ever have a bastard. 

In the North, the letter serves a dual purpose. It convinces many that the dragonrider is a Targaryen, but that is easy to believe. All men on dragonback are Targaryens. It convinces many more, who have not looked into his grey eyes, that he is a Stark. The news from the northern war is sparse, but Sansa consumes every shred she can. The Ironborn have gone. Galbart Glover has returned to Deepwood Motte, seemingly from nowhere, and has proclaimed for Jon Snow. The Mormonts have followed his lead, and the Karstarks after them.

Then the Dreadfort burns. A Harrenhal for the North, Lord Baelish suggests, with a wicked smile. It’s the Targaryen equivalent of a warning shot, because they burn the castle so slowly, with so long circling in advance, that most of its population has fled by the time the Targaryen Stark burns it. 

They call him the Ice Dragon by then, and think themselves very witty. He is a Dragon for the Targaryens, but his blood is northern ice, they say. Also, the Ice Dragon is a constellation, and the Daynes are famous for their stars. It is not so clever, but once upon a time, a girl called Sansa might have loved the sort of story where a mysterious prince swooped out of the sky and saved a princess. Alayne doesn’t want to be saved, but she thinks of another girl in Winterfell, at the hand of a murderer, and thinks that a prince might be of some use to her. 

As it is, when Prince Jon comes to the Eyrie, he does so not on dragonback, but by ship. The North is his, and all the northmen are at the wall, along, he tells them, with Queen Daenerys and the three dragons. 

The news from the south has been more confused, or Baelish has allowed Alayne to hear less of it, but it is known that Dorne is in open rebellion, that Princess Myrcella and the Kingslayer are hostages, and that armies are being called yet again. 

“If I might ask,” Baelish says, disgusting worm that he usually is, “my Prince, what has brought you to the Eerie?”

It fascinates her that he hasn’t brought his dragon. Perhaps he’s underestimated Lord Baelish, just like everyone else. 

Prince Jon smiles pleasantly and introduces his companions. The dornishman at his right shoulder is the infamous Prince Oberyn Martell, and the dangerous-looking woman at his left is Admiral Asha Greyjoy, Queen of the Iron Isles. 

“We have come to the Vale,” Prince Jon says, “to ask a boon of my kinsman your lord.”

Baelish’s smile is slimy as a toad. “Why of course, my Prince. We have ever been awaiting the Targaryen return.”

Prince Oberyn’s arched eyebrow is quite spectacular. For his age, he is a very handsome man, lithe and muscled. He carries no sword and instead, a spear rests dangerously in his hand. The butt is on the ground, so, for now, it is not being used. 

“That’s funny,” he says, “if I were you, I would not have assumed that a boy who shares a name with Jon Arryn has forgotten his legacy.”

Nobody laughs. Targaryen says peaceably, “we are grateful for your personal loyalty, Lord Baelish. You may begin by offering to grant what we – that is, Queen Daenerys and I – ask of you.”

Alayne can feel the Vale Lords lean in. Prince Jon says, “my friends and I will stay the night. When tomorrow dawns, I will ask each of you individually to bend the knee. Any Lord who bends the knee will send men North, to fight for the next Dawn. We will not ask you to fight the living, only the dead. If he has no men to send north, he might at least send his women south, that they be safer if the dead come.” It’s a threat, of course. Any women they send will be hostages, and any men they send now will weaken their armies later. But it’s neat, too. Too generous an offer to be sanely refused. “Any man who does not bend the knee will only be asked himself to go north, or his eldest son should he be too infirm, that he might serve against the dead and prove to the Queen that despite his lack of faith, he possesses honour, courage, and a sense of duty to the realm.”

It’s very neat, and very fair. Baelish grits his teeth, but is forced to welcome the Prince and his retinue. Then Prince Jon says, abruptly, “a few of my noble guests are staying on the ship, that they might trouble their hosts the less. Could someone be sent with trays of dinner for them?”  
Alayne is immediately volunteered for the task, that she might accrue information, and finds herself personally escorted by Asha Greyjoy, first to the kitchens and then to the ship. Greyjoy leers at her like a man, but carries a tray to help her like a woman. She must be Theon’s sister, and she looks at women with the same naked hunger that he did.

On the ship, she’s taken to one of its great rooms. Alayne would have expected a room this big to be occupied by Greyjoy, who is a Queen, or by either of the two princes aboard. Instead, there are three people there. Two women lying on the bed, one pregnant and one not, and the third, a man, sitting in the chair beside them. The woman on the left is pregnant, and is the only one of the three whose presence doesn’t stir an immediate shock of recognition in her. The white dog – wolf it’s a wolf – resting at the man’s feet looks up at her with shocking red eyes.

“Thank the gods,” the pregnant woman says, “I’m absolutely starving.” 

Greyjoy says, “this is Alayne Stone, Lord Baelish’s bastard. Presumably sent to spy on us.”

She fixes her eyes firmly on the ground. Shame is the best she can offer them. Baelish will be angry with her later. 

“Well that’ll be dull for her,” the pregnant woman says. As Alayne steps forward to place the tray on her lap, she says, “Alys of Thenn, lately of House Karstark. I’m not getting off this ship because Prince Targaryen says he doesn’t trust your lord father as far as he can throw him, and if he gets me killed while I’m representing the Thenns in the south, Sigorn will lop his princely head off.”

The name Thenn is totally unfamiliar. The name Karstark is very much not. “Lady Alys.”

She forces herself to nod and curtsy to all of them, although looking two of them in the eyes is so hard. Especially the man, who only looks up when Greyjoy says, surprisingly softly, “how is it today?”

He looks at them both, and his eyes, almost glazed over, go very wide. “Well enough, I thought, but I wasn’t seeing…” He looks to the other woman. “Jeyne, the bastard, ignore her hair but–”

“I see it,” Jeyne says, voice barely a whisper. 

“What?” Queen Greyjoy demands. 

She forces herself to say it before either of them can. Not for Theon, who she hates, but for Jeyne. She didn’t even know her friend was still alive. “I’m Sansa Stark.”

Jeyne’s up from the bed in seconds, knocking her tray over and nearly Alys Thenn’s, who makes a startled squawking noise. Her arms are around Sansa, and she’s crying, and Sansa’s crying, and, for some obscure reason, Theon is crying, and it’s all a bit much, really, but it’s the happiest she’s been in a very long time. 

Later, when they disentangle from the hug, Sansa looks up to discover that Queen Greyjoy is standing with her hand on her brother’s shoulder, steadying him. Sansa says, “you killed them. Rickon and Bran.”

Oddly, it’s Alys Thenn who speaks. “No,” she says, “he didn’t. I’ve seen Lord Rickon myself not two fortnights ago, and he looks quite like King Robb.”

Rickon, she learns, is being fostered with the new House Thenn for the duration of the war, the only people in Westeros wild enough to take him, with good enough blood – from Lady Alys – to not offer insult to the rest of the North’s lords. Nobody’s seen Bran in years, but that is probably a good sign, given what she’s heard about the late Lords Bolton. 

She looks hard at Theon. “Did you burn Winterfell?”

He shakes his head and says, “but I did betray Robb. He was my friend, like my brother, and I-”

Queen Greyjoy says, “perhaps not now,” and Sansa looks at him more carefully, takes in the change in his hair color, the missing fingers, the stooped way he curls up in his chair, and wonders what became of the teasing, clever boy she knew between the Sack of Winterfell and now. Maybe she doesn’t want to know. Reaver clambers to his feet and comes to push his head against Sansa until she scratches behind his ears. Reaver never liked her much before. He was always the most antisocial of the direwolves. But now he lets Sansa bury her face in his warm coat. Eyes closed, she can almost imagine it’s Lady instead.

Later, they don’t really talk about it. Jon Targaryen is summoned back to his ship away from dinner, and Sansa meets her cousin properly, for the first time. Jeyne adores him, and that makes Sansa trust him more. He sits her down and tells her his plan for Petyr Baelish, and so she is not surprised when the next morning, he makes all the lords kneel or stand before Baelish does, and then tries Baelish for his close association with the Lannisters. Sansa stands and accuses him of the murder of Lysa Arryn, Jon Arryn, and Joffrey Waters. Baelish says, “the Waters boy was a pretender to your throne, Prince Targaryen.” He can’t deny the Arryns, not with Sansa’s words and the imposing way Reaver stands beside her. Theon has allowed her to borrow the White Wolf for this, and she’s profoundly grateful for it.

Jon says, “Lord Baelish, the difference between Queen Daenerys and her father is the same as the difference between Queen Daenerys and Tywin Lannister. She doesn’t kill her enemies at their weddings, burn men for asking questions, or pull children from their beds and beat them to death. And she certainly doesn’t kill them, frame an innocent girl for the crime, and then, instead of aiding her in returning to her family, attempt to use her as a puppet before murdering her aunt before her very eyes.”

Prince Oberyn stands behind him as Reaver does for her, an imposing figure threatening any who dares doubt his words. When it comes time for the execution, Sansa says, “in the North, the man who passes the sentence swings the sword.” It’s a test, of sorts, to see if there is as much of the wolf in her cousin’s heart as in his looks. 

Dawn is the sharpest blade in Westeros, even if it is not so heavy as Ice; it takes his head cleanly, in a single stroke. When it’s all done, Sansa sails south, with a dozen hostages from the Vale, the Ice Dragon, the Prince of Dorne, and the Greyjoys. They stop at Dragonstone, leave the hostages, Lady Alys and the formidable Tyene Sand with Queen Daenerys’s Castellan, some Velaryon, and then sail further south again, around Dorne to Starfall. 

They’re there with several ships from the Greyjoy fleet to pick up the Dornish soldiers who had been guarding the western border against attacks from Highgarden. Now, though, the landscape of southern Westeros has changed yet again. Sansa doesn’t think Baelish heard about the latest Tyrell marriage alliance, and the doom it spells for the Lannisters. 

Prince Jon explains well, when she asks him to. “With me on the throne, and revealed as Rhaegar’s son, the shame that lay on House Dayne for the last eight and ten years is lifted. Even though my mother has a bastard in truth, she’s Oberyn’s and born on purpose, which, in Dorne, makes it very different than a broken marriage pact like my mother and your father’s. Besides, Daenerys and I are legitimizing her as the heir to Starfall. Willas Tyrell, the heir to Highgarden, is one of my aunt Allyria’s oldest friends. Her husband is dead, last anyone heard of him. The aunt of a king is not so much worse a marriage prospect than the offer he got from the Lannisters for Lady Cersei, and Allyria is far less likely to strangle him in his sleep.”

The south is so strange. Even now, having spent years away from Winterfell, it’s all still overwhelming. 

Sansa considers all this a moment before she asks, “what will become of Lady Margaery and Ser Loras?”

Oddly, the Prince is willing to answer many of her questions. She can understand why people might have believed him her father’s bastard. Even beyond the looks, he has a serious and noble way of being that is so like him it stings. 

“Ser Loras may take a position on the Queensguard, if he wishes it. Most are not yet occupied. Lady Margaery… nothing is settled, but I will have to wed a great lady when all this is done. The Queen had her fertility stolen by a witch.” Yes, because in this world of the frozen dead and dragons, that is a thing that can happen to a person. By the Seven. “Unless something goes amiss, Margaery Tyrell will likely be that lady.”

Sansa barely knows these people, but finds she wants to help. She needs to help. Because Jon Targaryen is some of her last remaining kin, but more because he freed Alys Karstark from an unwanted marriage, because, despite his dragon, he didn’t burn Winterfell to take it, and because of the way Jeyne trusts him. And because Reaver likes him. Theon’s direwolf is as likely to be found at Prince Jon’s feet as Theon’s, and Reaver does not trust easily. So, she speaks. 

“Margaery Tyrell is a scheming girl, or her grandmother is. But she’s not horrid like Queen Cersei. I think you could come to love her, if it came to that.” Except– “But you have one political marriage already, Prince Jon. If another alternative is needed, I could marry Ser Loras. I doubt the union would be fruitful, but with Rickon alive it doesn’t need to be.” She certainly wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t. 

He looks at her very oddly. “Aren’t you still married to Lord Tyrion?”

She’s almost forgotten. It certainly never applied to Alayne, and it was never really real to begin with. “Unconsummated. Could be annulled any time.”

“Probably,” says Prince Jon, smiling a little, “but not without a little insult to the Lord Regent of Meereen, and we’d prefer not to, if possible. When you insult him, he drinks too much wine and complains.” Abruptly, he changes direction. “Of course, he would not challenge an annulment if you asked. Lord Tyrion is a good man.”

Sansa’s supposed to hate the Lannisters, but Tyrion was never cruel to her in the way Joffrey and Cersei were. She was glad when she heard Lord Dayne saved his life. She will have to thank him, when they disembark at Starfall. 

The Tyrell party arrives at Starfall just a day after theirs, rather unexpectedly but fortuitously. Loras has snuck Margaery, the Queen herself, out of King’s Landing right from under Tywin Lannister’s nose. He’s keeping it quiet, for now, but Sansa can’t help but smile when she imagines the fury of Cersei’s face. She’s still travelling south and will be for many days until she reaches Highgarden. It will take hard riding that Sansa never expected from the Rose of Highgarden, although she knows that Margaery’s definition of womanly pursuits included hawking and riding both. Though his siblings are still travelling, Lord Willas is here now, and that is more than enough for a wedding. 

In another life, Sansa might have married this future Lord, and looking on him now is… odd. Like a window into something that never was. He walks with a limp and a cane, but he still rides well with a modified saddle, and laughs like Margaery would when Prince Oberyn scoops him into his arms with a shout. The Prince’s paramour also embraces him with no regard for decency, and then he greets Allyria Dayne Dondarrion, and blushes when she smiles at him. It’s sweet. Sansa wishes that she was still a girl who believed in stories like this one. But then, a widow and a crippled lord would not be in many stories. Perhaps she is glad that she can believe in stories like this one, now. They wed in the Sept of Starfall, with the same cloak Allyria used at her first wedding, and a quickly-stitched Tyrell one. Lady Ashara cries, and Lord Dayne looks proudly stoic.

She meets Ashara Dayne several times in public, but only speaks with her privately when she has seen the back of Prince Jon and the Greyjoys. Theon offered to leave Reaver with her and Jeyne, but Sansa refused. She can see the way Theon holds tightly to him for comfort and, though once she would have screamed at the injustice that Theon’s horrid beast survived all this time that Lady didn’t, she couldn’t help but think Robb would have wanted Theon to keep him. Whatever bad blood lay between them – and there was so much of it – he had always been the champion of Theon and his wolf. 

Lady Ashara stands in a high tower, and together they watch the dawn creep over the horizon. After the bustle of the wedding, Starfall seems almost serene. Most of the army is gone, Lord Dayne and Jaime Lannister are gone North with them. The Tyrells and Lady Allyria are gone to Highgarden, and so it is now Sansa, Jeyne, Lady Ashara, Ellaria Sand, Trystane Martell, and Oberyn’s bastards who make up the noble population of Starfall. Myrcella and her kingsguard are there too, but Sansa never sees them. Even Jaime Lannister has taken more opportunities to parade himself around. Now, so early as it is, in all the world it seems to be just the two of them, and Lady Lance below in the yard, running drills alone.

“I hate waking this early,” she says, softly, “but Arthur loves it. I used to joke that it was prideful of him, always going to look at himself in the sky. Now that I’m older, I understand why he likes it so much. Not, mind, that I’ll ever be an early riser, but I like it none the less.”

Sansa assumed that Lady Ashara would hate her for who her father was, but she quickly re-evaluates that opinion.

The Lady is, despite the lines of age on her face, one of the most beautiful women Sansa has ever seen. She can easily see how, before her shaming – the lie of her shaming – she was sometimes counted above women like Cersei Lannister as the most beautiful in all of Westeros. Her indigo eyes are deep, and if she widened them she would have all the beauty of innocence. As it is, she holds herself sharply, wise as well as beautiful. It is no wonder that this woman raised a boy like Jon Targaryen, who could convince every Lord of the Vale to submit to him without even his dragon at his side, and yet was so able to be gentle that Jeyne and Theon had no fear for him whatsoever. 

After a while of them speaking, the Lady says, “I imagine that you must look very like your mother.”

So, they’ve finally come to it. “Yes, Lady Dayne.”

She turns her face to smile sadly at Sansa. By now, the sun has finally stopped kissing the horizon and hangs just out of its reach. “You may call me Ashara, child. In another world, we might have been the closest of kin.” She looks away again. Though Sansa doesn’t know it, the truth of Eddard Stark’s dishonour is on the tip of her tongue. She pushes it down. It is better that they both be remembered for Jon, who lives, than for the child that died.

Sansa says, “Jon’s a good boy. A good man.”

This time, her smile is broad and genuine. “Yes, Lady Stark. He is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t think Ashara ever does tell her, about Ned actually having had a real bastard. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss. 
> 
> Meanwhile, in King’s Landing:
> 
> Cersei: hey has anyone seen Margaery and Loras lately  
> Tywin, handwaving: go away and stop bothering me about those annoying and useless Tyrells.   
> Cersei, several hours later: uhhhh dad  
> Tywin: no, shh. I’m think about gold.   
> Cersei: no really  
> *repeat for like 8 hours until Tywin actually takes Cersei’s serious concern seriously*


	6. Tyrion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tyrion and Alleras return from Meereen to a Westeros far different than the one they left. There is much to mourn, much to celebrate, and much left to be done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW/TW: grief/mourning, mentions of suicide + murder of a child, canon-typical misogyny, implied misgendering of trans character (not by Tyrion), implied/referenced canonical incest.

When Tyrion finally returns from Meereen, the War for the Dawn is long over, a year and some. He and Alleras have spent all this time slowly bleeding power to a governing council, and, at this point, the work can be done just as well by them as by Tyrion and Alleras. The Unsullied, who by this point have largely settled down in the city, stay there. It’s their home. Missandei and Grey Worm, Daenerys’s friends, come to take their place as notional regents, but at this point, there’s hardly any work to speak of. Tyrion and Alleras wish them well, take their ship, and sail for King’s Landing. 

There’s been so much death since Tyrion was here last. For him, the streets are haunted. He thinks of his father’s last stand, besieged inside the city and betrayed by his own men in their hurry to flee from the threat of wildfire. He thinks of Cersei, poisoning herself and her son rather than losing to people who never would have hurt Tommen. He thinks of Shae, who hasn’t been seen in many long months. He hopes she left the city and went somewhere the war didn’t touch.

Alleras has ghosts of his own to confront, but none of them reside here. His ghosts are at the Wall; his father, and the ladies Obara and Nymeria all died in the war there. Many did. Jorah Mormont did, and all the dragons. Most of the Night’s Watch, a good portion of the young men of the Eyrie, Dorne, the Reach, and the North most of all, almost all the Unsullied who didn’t stay in Meereen, and the sons of many of Westeros’s noble houses. Names and people Tyrion supposes he should know better. Loras Tyrell, a handful of Hightowers, many Florents, even a few Freys, in defience of all their blood. He never knew them, and can’t grieve. 

Despite all this, their time in King’s Landing is not so bad. Tyene is still at Daenerys’s side, at Jon’s side. They say that she helped break the siege of the city, sneaking past the walls and ringing the bells to signal the surrender. For her troubles, a deep, knotted scar mars her beautiful face, and Tyrion feels a kinship with her for that. Daenerys makes Tyrion her Master of Coin, and introduces him to the rest of the Small Council. Pycelle is gone, finally, and in his place is a rather fat young man that she introduces as “Samwell Tarly, he served us bravely in the True War.”

They call it the True War, and the fight against Cersei the False War. For Robert’s false children and their false claim against Daenerys, and because the Westerlands are the only kingdom not to have lost any sons in the True War, demonstrating the falseness of their hearts.

Even having lost Pycelle, there are still three on the council who have served Kings before. Ser Barristan, as the head of the new Queensguard, and Varys, the Master of Whispers. He, they say, smuggled now-Princess Margaery and Ser Loras free from the dangerous claws of Tywin Lannister and into those of the Dragon. Tyrion doesn’t trust him, much, but it’s good to have a familiar face. One day, Tyene Sand will sit in the same seat. The last of the old guard is Stannis Baratheon, who is now the Master of Laws, which makes a great deal more sense than having him be the Master of Ships. The Master of Ships, on the other hand, is Theon Greyjoy, brother of Queen Asha of the Iron Islands. The odd semi-independence the islands have received is captured nowhere better than in his person, brother of a Queen, serving another Queen, for… no particular personal gain, as far as Tyrion can tell. He’s an odd, battered boy, but Master of Ships isn’t much of a position anyhow, aside from pointing out that there should be ships and knowing which are best. And that he certainly can do. His white wolf, the size of a pony, sits in on council meetings, when it isn’t at Jon’s feet during his public audiences.

The last position, of course, is the Hand of the Queen, and it is certainly the oddest choice. Naturally, it had to go to a Dornishman, in recognition of all the service the Dornish had given over the years, but nobody expected that to be Ashara Dayne.

When Tyrion asks why, Jon stares like it should be obvious, and Daenerys says, “a hand should be loyal, noble, and should know the duties of the court. She should be of sound mind and good judgement.”

Well, Tyrion supposes he can’t argue with that. Besides, the Tower of the Hand hasn’t had children in it since Joffrey killed Ned Stark, and it’s nice to see little Rhaenys Dayne running around getting into everything. And it changes things. Daenerys, of course, has always preferred having women on her council and in her guard, and having only Lady Ashara as Hand, Tyene as Doran’s representative, and a Mormont in her Queensguard is really rather restrained. Tyrion is all for her changing the world, but he would rather do it one piece at a time than with a storm of fire.

Soon, he will have to stay here, but first, he has elsewhere he has to be. 

Alleras comes with him again when they sail south. They’ve been together for so long it feels that they ought to delay parting ways as long as possible, so both will take a more circuitous route to the places they need to go. He’s one of the best friends Tyrion has ever had, even if he is also one of the oddest. He’s going back to Oldtown, he says, rather sadly. His father always thought he would finish forging his chain, finish the Great Con of House Martell. 

“Even when I told him it wouldn’t be a con because I really was a boy,” Alleras says, staring mournfully into the distance, “he said that they would not like to give a chain to the son of Oberyn Martell any more than the daughter, and I would just have to prove them wrong.” He twists the bracelet on his wrist. There’s a single link on it, the only one he had time to forge before running off to help Jon. The rest is but string.

Tyrion’s not really sure what to say to him, so he doesn’t say anything at all. Oberyn Martell, he thinks, was a far better father to his bastards than Tywin Lannister was to any of his trueborn children.

They stop in Sunspear to see Arianne Martell. Prince Doran is in the Water Gardens, but Arianne, who Tyrion last met when he was being tried for murder, is one of Alleras’s oldest friends. They hold each other and weep for those they’ve lost. Tyrion pays the Princess all the expected courtesies, agrees to take a letter from Prince Trystane with him, and then they’re on their way again. 

They stop at Starfall, which, for the first time in decades, is entirely unoccupied by Daynes. Lady Ashara, of course, is in King’s Landing, and Lady Allyria is producing a new brood of Tyrells to marry off in Highgarden. As for Lord Dayne himself, nobody seems either sure of the answer or willing to tell. They’ve stopped here because Ellaria Sand is, in the Dayne’s absence, the castellan, and Alleras wants to see the rest of his sisters. In the end, he stays there, says he will find transport to Oldtown in his own time, and Tyrion finds himself without his odd friend for the first time in years. Perhaps, when Alleras forges as many links as he wants, he can come back and substitute in for the strange current Grand Maester, who seems to have been appointed without any real qualifications through the sheer force of Daenerys’s will. Then Tarly could actually go forge a few without worry of another like Pycelle taking his place. Or maybe he could become the Maester at the Rock. Tyrion just wants an excuse to see him more often than he will while Alleras is in Oldtown. He’s had very few friends in his life who understand his mind, and Alleras is the foremost of them.

It feels like an eternity has passed by the time they arrive at Casterly Rock. Tyrion, who hasn’t seen his childhood home since the precession north to Winterfell, all those long years ago, finds that it has hardly changed at all and is totally different. The physical structure of the castle is ancient and unchanged. There are still lions everywhere, golden-haired Lannisters everywhere, and their golden-haired bastards. But things are different, too. The people are different. Jaime is a very different kind of lord than Tywin was, and it shows. At the party after Tyrion’s arrival, there is laughter and dancing from the servants as well as the nobility. Young Joy Hill is there, being courted quite seriously as she is known to be favoured by the Lord of the Rock, and it is known that he will punish any man who toys with her heart. Myrcella is, despite everything, a much happier child than Tyrion remembers her mother being, and she grabs at Prince Trystane’s letter with excitement. 

“She’s counting down the days until she’s of age and can go back to Dorne,” Jaime says, with a laugh in his voice as his daughter runs off. “I think she plans to model her life after Ellaria Sand, mothering a brood of bastards for a Martell prince.”

Ellaria, sort-of widowed but no less powerful, strikes an imposing figure. It’s not what Cersei would have wanted for her daughter, but Tyrion expects that Myrcella could be happy with Prince Trystane, even not as his wife. And now that she is Myrcella Waters, not Myrcella Baratheon, it may be the best she can do. 

“Did you ever consider asking Daenerys to legitimize her?” Tyrion could ask. He’s served Daenerys well in Meereen, he thinks. 

Jaime shrugs. “We discussed it, and it was considered too great a risk to her authority. Of course, that was when Tommen was still alive, but I think she would prefer it if you or I could produce a legitimate child. Besides, she’s trying to make hers and Prince Jon’s the last incestuous Targaryen marriage, and this would send the wrong message.”

Princess Margaery isn’t pregnant, yet, but her and Prince Jon’s children will inherit the Iron Throne. Then, the children will only be a quarter Targaryen, and the last of the Valyrian blood well and truly diluted. 

“So,” Tyrion says, “should I alert the maesters to watch for a raven bearing a wedding announcement?”

Jaime just smiles, sadly, and Tyrion imagines that he’s thinking of Cersei, the only woman he ever would have considered marrying. 

Arthur Dayne joins them a few days later, returning from putting down some bandits with, of all people, Brienne of Tarth, and Podrick Payne. Of all the places in Westeros to find the Lord of Starfall, this would not have been close to the top of the list. Of course, he knows that Dayne and Jaime are old friends, that Dayne fought the Mountain because Jaime asked him, but that is a very different thing than leaving his home to live, seemingly permanently, on the other side of Westeros. Brienne, he understands. Her father yet lives, she’s got nowhere better to be, and she’s practically an honorary Lannister at this point. The sword says as much. And she’s not staying long. She has a commitment in Winterfell, she says, with the North’s Regent, Lady Sansa. She gives Tyrion a very long look when she says this, one that makes him want to sink into the ground. 

Maybe he shall have to go further north before he goes back to King’s Landing. Or maybe the Lady of Winterfell would consent to meet him there. He sends her a raven, offering an annulment if she wants it, and with no idea what he’s going to do if she doesn’t. After all his family has done to hers, abandoning her after all the lords of Westeros believe he’s had her maidenhead seems very unfair. 

It takes him an embarrassingly long time to realize why Dayne is there, after so long spent with Alleras and Oberyn and all their kin. He’s forgotten that in the Westerlands one does not introduce their brothers to their paramours and lovers. 

Him and Jaime don’t talk much about feelings. They don’t talk about Tysha or Cersei, or they didn’t, before Tyrion went to Meereen and served the Mother of Dragons. 

As it is, they stay up late one night in Jaime’s rooms, after Myrcella has gone to bed, and speak plainly of her mother. Jaime’s fist clenches, and he shakes, as they speak of the way she killed Tommen.

“He was a good boy,” Tyrion says, thinking of him and his love of cats. He tells Jaime that he’s thinking about the cats, and Jaime says something odd in turn. 

“Rhaenys was always asking for that ridiculous cat of hers,” he says, and for a moment Tyrion thinks of Rhaenys Dayne and tries to remember if she has a cat. Then he continues, “Tommen reminded me of her, a bit. So shockingly innocent despite everything.” That Rhaenys, then. 

They had the same fate, in the end. Killed by the wickedness of Lannisters rather than the madness of Targaryens. 

There is silence between them for a while. Jaime stares into his wine. Then he says, abruptly, “I killed Aerys because there were stores of wildfire beneath the city, and he planned to kill everyone inside.”

Oh, Tyrion thinks, and imagines Stannis’s fleet going up in an eruption of green flames. “Is that why Daenerys let you live?”

“No,” says Jaime, shortly, “she let me live because she likes you, because she needs our blood, and because she thinks fucking Arthur keeps me in line.”

It takes Tyrion a minute to process this statement. He can tell his face is going red, which rarely happens, least of all with Jaime who’s only fucked one woman in his whole life, and this is mortifying. 

“Are you fucking Arthur,” Tyrion asks, “or is Arthur fucking you?”

It has the desired reaction of turning Jaime’s face far redder than this own, which Tyrion also supposes is all the answer he needs. It’s the first time in their entire life that he’s actually had something to tease Jaime about that doesn’t seem to make him feel bitterness or shame, merely simple embarrassment. 

Tyrion’s always been a stupid romantic, and after a moment he says, “I’m glad for you, if that helps.”

“Mmm,” Jaime mumbles agreeably into his cup. Then, seeming very far away, he says, “I used to think she was the only person I could ever love. Who could ever love me.”

Their relationship isn’t like this. They don’t talk about things. Tyrion supposes this means Arthur has been good for him. “What changed your mind?”

“It was a long time coming, I think.” The fingers of his left hand squeeze tight around the goblet. “I was always in awe of him, and then I hated him for leaving, for not dying with the rest of them. And then I realized that Aerys broke him as much as me, and that made me oddly fond of him again.” He finally meets Tyrion’s eyes. “And then I asked him to die for you. He knew everything about me that was bad, that I fucked Cersei and almost killed the Stark boy and that I did kill Aerys, and that I didn’t save Elia, and all he asked me was if you were innocent. When I said yes, he just… believed me.”

Tyrion wonders what went wrong, that Jaime’s only requirement for falling in love with someone is that they believe him when he’s telling the truth. He assumes it was either their Lord Father’s fault or Cersei’s, as most things are. 

“Is–” he begins, before being interrupted by a knocking at the door. Jaime sets his goblet down and opens it to reveal Arthur Dayne, dressed down from that evening’s garb, but still looking well put together. When he sees Tyrion, he turns to go, but Jaime’s hand closes around his wrist and draws him inside. Then Jaime kisses him, in a tender way that is incongruous with everything Tyrion knows about Jaime as a person. When he draws away, Dayne smiles broadly. 

He’s older than Jaime, hair gone from silver to a darker grey, but Tyrion supposes the difference between them is smaller than that between him and his wife, and unlike Sansa, Jaime is a man grown, has been for many years, and is the Warden of the West. Of course, Ser Arthur, as Jon’s closest father figure, is one of the few men in Westeros who is more powerful than him. Come to that, Sansa is acting as a regent for the Warden of the North, so maybe things are a little more complicated than that. 

Dayne says, “I take it this means you told him.”

Jaime smiles back, and Tyrion tries to remember the last time he looked this happy. He never thought that Jaime could look happy in a world where Cersei was dead, but apparently, he was wrong. 

Dayne joins them, and by the time Tyrion stumbles off to bed, he’s well versed in calling the man Arthur.

He isn’t left alone with Arthur for a few more days, and it gives him time to reflect, to observe him and Jaime both. Arthur and Brienne are always dragging Jaime out to the practice yards, to make him as good with his left hand as he was with his right. Neither of them ever blink at any mistakes he makes, and when Pod joins them, Arthur is determined to instruct him, and careful not to hurt him more than is necessary. Tyrion has the chance to observe him with Myrcella too, and is rather delighted to find that she seems to adore him. Other times, he goes to join Jaime when he’s doing the real duties of a lord, going over finances and sending ravens, to find Arthur already there, helping him with reading and checking that his spelling is fair enough. Jaime isn’t stupid, and having someone else there to make these tasks that are inexplicably hard for him easier seems to lighten the load. Besides, Arthur doesn’t treat Jaime like he’s stupid. Cersei and their father always did. Tyrion has done the same himself, too often for his own liking. But Arthur Dayne doesn’t, and Tyrion is glad for that.

“I think you make him very happy,” Tyrion says. He’s run into the man in the library, as luck would have it.

Arthur looks up from his book and says, “I’m glad you think so. And I’m glad you don’t mind. Jaime holds your opinion in high regard.”

“And yours,” says Tyrion, although he hasn’t thought of it as such until this precise moment. “You’re the one who brought him around to Jon and Daenerys. I never could have done that.”

He closes his book, the ancient pages clapping together pleasingly. Tyrion cannot help but note, with some pleasure, that it is about dragons. 

Turning his strange purple eyes on Tyrion, Arthur says, “Jaime did that himself. He chose it because he loves you, and because he wanted to protect Myrcella and Tommen, and because he wishes he could have protected Elia. All I did was help him be free from Cersei.”

A world where Jaime is free from Cersei seems an odd one. As she was so fond of saying, they came into this world together. They belonged together. But all they ever did was break each other, and even if they hadn’t been siblings, Tyrion doesn’t think Jaime could ever really have been made better by someone with as much hate in her heart as Cersei had. Arthur couldn’t even kill the man who broke his sister’s heart and allegedly took her honour. He has less anger in him than Cersei had in her little finger. Apparently, that’s what Jaime needs. 

“That is more than I ever could have done for him.” 

His voice is soft, fitting for the stillness of the library. “You helped. Cersei trying to kill you was the first thing that made him see her for the woman she really was, I think. The fact that he loves you helped. Brienne helped too. I think Jaime’s heart becomes a little lighter every time he tells someone what Aerys did, and Brienne was the first person he ever told who didn’t see for themselves the things he did.”

Tyrion hadn’t realized they were so close. “None of that changes the fact that you’re good for him. Since I can count on one finger the number of people who’ve ever been with Jaime and been good for him, that means a great deal.”

“It means a great deal to me too,” he says, “both that Jaime feels as he does, and that we have his family’s blessing.”

He’s the only person left to give it, and the only person who would have anyways. Quite sincerely, he says, “I wish you both all the happiness in the world.”

Then he leaves before Arthur can see his eyes get oddly teary as he thinks about the unsuitable person he once loved, and the fact that he’ll never see her again. He supposes he should be jealous of Jaime, angry that Jaime helped take Tysha from him, and yet is the one to get a happy ending. But then he thinks of Jaime bursting in to see Arthur after he killed the Mountain, and finds that he can’t bear to be jealous at all.

That night, when the castle is sleeping, he walks past what was once his father’s study to find the sitting together behind the desk. Jaime’s dozing, head lolling onto Arthur’s shoulder, and Arthur is looking at him with unbelievable fondness. Tyrion closes the door as quiet as he can, and leaves them in their peace.

The next morning, he sends a second raven to Winterfell. 

_Lady Sansa_ , he writes, letters clean and finely formed. _With your permission, I would like to request an annulment. I suspect you will already have responded to my first raven by the time this reaches you, but this replaces that request for clarity with some clarity of my own. I could not be a good husband to you, nor do I have any desire to do so. You have your own duties and family in the North, and I the same here in the south. I wish you all the happiness in the world._

Years later, Tyrion finally manages to marry someone terribly unsuitable and scandalous, in the person of ‘Lady Sarella Sand’. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement, and it fulfils both of their lifelong ambitions. Alleras’s to finish his father’s mission of decimating the good name of House Lannister, and to pull a fantastic con (stealing Casterly Rock in the image of Lan himself) while he’s at it, and Tyrion’s, to marry someone who would have made his father wish for Tysha. Jaime has told him, by then, that she really loved him, although both their best efforts have found no sign of her. Tyrion is only glad that his father was long dead before he discovered the truth. What he would have done in vengeance for her, he does not like to imagine. Alleras is utterly unalike Shae and Tysha, a true peer with as much intelligence and greater learning. It’s sometimes harder, and sometimes easier. They name their children Joanna, Oberyn, and Nymeria. Only Oberyn is gold of hair. None, Tyrion is both relieved and oddly disappointed, are either bastards or dwarves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now just the epilogue (which is mostly a joke chapter to explain why the fuck ‘Aegon’ and JonCon never actually show up in this AU)


	7. Epilogue (Jon Connington)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After some very bad luck and a long detour to Asshai, Jon and ‘Aegon’ arrive in the only one of the seven kindgoms not to have allied with Daenarys Targaryen in the True War. Maybe in Casterly Rock, their luck will turn around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set somewhere during Tyrion’s chapter, after his visit to the Rock but significantly before he marries Alleras. Probably OOC, but *shrugs*.

“I’ll say what we are all thinking,” Arthur Dayne says, after staring into Jon’s eyes slightly too long for either of their comfort. “How did this come to pass?”

Jon looks pointedly towards the gold version of Arthur’s sigil that pins his red cloak. “I might ask you the same, Lord Dayne.”

“I’ll ask you both,” Jaime Lannister says, from his position at Arthur’s side. He’s a man who should be dead, Jon thinks, but here he is, placing his hands licentiously on a man Jon once took for an ally. “Although I suppose I already know Arthur’s half, it merits retelling. It is a very good story, after all.” His eyes fix themselves sharply on Aegon, but his words end there. 

They’ve come because, after the treachery of Varys and the Martells, they thought that the man who lost his entire family in the Sack of King’s Landing might be inclined to favour them. Arthur Dayne’s presence shows that Jon was mistaken, again. He’s sure that wherever Rhaegar is, he’s disappointed. 

“This is my son, Griff Storm,” he says, throat tightening. “Might he-”

As if on cue, a golden-haired girl dashes through the courtyard, holding hands with a Dornish girl, followed by a young boy, dripping wet, a girl in Stark colours, another blonde, and the ugliest woman Jon’s ever seen. Lannister roars with laughter, and Arthur’s face breaks out into a smile. 

The woman stops when she sees them, gestures vaguely after the children, and tells some story about some petty disagreement and her squire and Arthur’s squire and Jaime–can’t–you–keep–your–daughter–in–line and Lannister says that “the Sand Snake” is a bad influence, and there’s a terrible crashing noise from the stables. 

“Brienne,” Arthur cuts in to their banter, “might you take Griff here and introduce him to the rest of the Rock’s resident miscreants?”

Looking deeply unapologetic, Lannister says, “my apologies. Obella Sand, a friend of my daughter’s, is visiting from Dorne. She takes great delight in torturing Lady Brienne’s squire. Ser Arthur’s squire, Lady Arya, cannot abide such injustice, and usually escalates. Joy, in turn, can’t abide being left out of the incident. We’re all counting down the days until Brienne takes Podrick back to Winterfell.”

There’s so many bizarre details in that story that Jon can’t even formulate a question to ask. Arthur crosses the courtyard in a few quick steps and grabs him by the arm. Fortunately, it’s the flesh arm.

“Come,” he says, in a tone that is both overly familiar and totally commanding. “There is much to discuss.”

They’re alone, he, Arthur, and Lannister, when Arthur says, “let us begin with the fact that there is no possibility that child is your son, shall we?” Arthur knows, of course. But Jon thought he had the decency not to discuss such things in front of Jaime Lannister. Apparently, he was wrong. 

“An orphan,” he says, to defend the boy, “of little consequence.”

“I raised an orphan of little consequence,” Arthur reminds him. “That boy – Rhaegar’s son – is Prince Consort of the Seven Kingdoms.”

A son with Jon’s name. And hadn’t that been like a knife in the heart. Arthur, seemingly determined to twist it deeper, says, “Ashara always liked to say that he was named for you, but the lie of Jon Arryn made him safer. She was very fond of you, until we heard that you were passing off a boy in Essos as Rhaegar’s trueborn son.”

They know, then. Jon’s just killed them both. He wonders if the ugly woman has his son in chains already, or if he’s still playing with children, delaying the inevitable. 

“I didn’t know there was another,” Jon says. 

Arthur says, “no one did. Not even Doran. We knew what you schemers would do if you got your hands on any of their children.”

Arthur was one of Rhaegar’s oldest friends. “And Oberyn Martell? What was he?”

“Oberyn wanted Elia’s son to live. He thought that the life of a bastard could be a good one.”

Jon thinks that, despite living most of his life little better than a bastard, Aegon has not had such a bad life. “What are you going to do about…” He may as well say it, he can’t imagine the kingslayer letting them live much longer. “Aegon.”

Arthur looks at the Lord of Casterly Rock. After a moment, Lannister says, “far be it for me to scold a man for supporting a false king. If we yet had dragons, we would have a simple test. As it is, I offer you three choices. The first is to put your claim to the Queen, that your boy is Aegon Targaryen. I will aid you in arriving before her, but no further. In truth, I think you a liar, or whoever told you he was Rhaegar’s son a liar. I was there the last few days. We all thought it had gone badly, but nobody imagined they would do to Elia what they did. The lie relies on the child being battered beyond recognition, and, had any other men arrived first, it more likely would have been carried before Robert alive, or had the throat slit. The trouble with Targaryen looking babies is that it is… rather obvious when one has been replaced. The second is to confess, before the Queen, the name of the person who told you he was Rhaegar’s. We know you weren’t the architect of this. In this option, you likely get Griffin’s Roost back, for your attempt at loyalty to Prince Jon’s brother. Also because Ser Ronnet is a crude and unpleasant man and we would all be well rid of him.”

It’s tempting. But Varys is not known for his ability to accept being betrayed and mistreated, and Jon does not know what will happen to Aegon if he is discovered not to be a Targaryen. Even with his Valyrian looks, Jon wonders more and more whether this boy who he loves more than anything can truly be Rhaegar’s son. He yearns for the truth, but doubts that Queen Daenerys could deduce it. Too many involved in the story are now dead. 

“And the third option?” Jon prompts. 

Lannister smiles sadly. “Go. As far as you can. To Yi-Ti or into the sunset for all I care. If word comes to us of you again, in any city closer than Qarth, you will die. I will not have you trouble the Queen even by your existence. She’s done well enough, been shockingly peaceful, but even a peaceful queen would know that Targaryen bastards are a threat. I offer you this only because I failed the real Aegon, and I would rather not have the death of the same man on my hands twiceover.”

“Why could she not marry him? She allowed Prince Jon to marry twice.”

“I think that four on the throne would be a little crowded,” Lannister japes. 

“Three.” Rhaegar would have liked three Targaryens on the throne. 

“Four,” Lannister says again. “Margaery Tyrell rules as much as any of them, and she’s the one carrying the heir as we speak. Five if you count the Lady Hand, who rules the Dornish delegation with a silk-gloved fist.”

It certainly sounds crowded, but then, when isn’t King’s Landing?

Arthur is neither so threatening nor so callous as Lannister. “Jon – you knew Elia better than most of King’s Landing. Surely you know that she never willingly would have given her son up. Surely you know that she would certainly have loved any child of Rhaegar and Lyanna’s.”

He doesn’t give two shits who Elia would have loved. Aegon is his son. Even if Jon may be in part named for him, Aegon is his son. Rhaegar’s son. But Prince Jon is Rhaegar’s son, too. His son by the woman he destroyed the Seven Kingdoms for. Jon hates that he has to decide between the boy he’s loved all his life, who is Rhaegar’s only on the word of a liar, and a complete stranger who has proven his blood by taming a dragon. He hates that he will have failed Rhaegar no matter what the outcome.

“He deserves better than this.” Jon knows he must sound an arrogant fool. 

Lannister says, “I know. Better than any man in Westeros, I know. Myrcella would have been a finer queen than any of them, and Tommen a kinder king.” 

There’s a familiar sharpness, a grief in his voice that takes Jon rather unawares. Arthur, whose grey hair does not make him look so much older than the silver did, rests a hand on Lannister’s knee. Jon tries not to stare. 

Arthur says, “most of the kingdom will have forgotten you were in love with Rhaegar. Convince him to become your son in truth, or you will both die.”

“You have no dragons to defend you.”

“You are a fool,” says Lannister, “if you think all they had were dragons. Even when Euron Greyjoy almost had one of the dragons for his own, The Driftwood Wolf tore his fucking throat out.”

He knows that. He knows they have the Iron Islands and the Reach, Dorne, the Riverlands and the North. Even the Eyrie and the Stormlands bow, to the Arryns and Baratheons that have ruled them for generations but are now realigned with house Targaryen. If there were any other option, he would be elsewhere.

There’s a noise outside the window. Arthur moves to look out, and Jon has a wild moment of contemplating pushing him out before he looks too. The ugly woman has a practice sword, and is facing the Stark girl and Aegon both. She’s good. Very good. But it is two on one, and it seems certain before the Lannister girl jumps on Aegon’s back. That’s when… Oberyn’s bastard, presumably, grabs her, and they’re scrapping in the dirt. The fourth girl, who is watching them with needlework in her lap, puts her head in her hands in despair.

Lannister, who is peering over Arthur’s shoulder, laughs. “Cersei would have hated that. Or perhaps loved it. She always would have preferred to have been born a boy.”

Arthur smiles, radiant as he always was, and Jon realizes three things all at once. First, these two are definitely fucking. Second, Aegon is standing there laughing, happy to be scrapping with bastard girls and hideous women with swords. Third, Rhaegar’s war is won. It’s won. His son sits on the Iron Throne, and his grandsons will sit it after him. 

He sways a little. Arthur grabs him to make sure he doesn’t fall out the window, feels the stone skin beneath his sleeve, and slams Jon so hard against the wall it almost breaks his head open. 

“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t kill you where you stand for bringing this here,” he hisses. 

Jon says, “why do you think it took us so long to get here? We had to go all the way to Asshai to find someone who could ensure it wouldn’t spread.”

Aegon insisted, once he heard that Daenerys had already wed, to another Targaryen. To a boy claiming to be his bastard brother at that. They had been so close at arriving to Meereen when it became obvious he was going to die. At that time, the general belief had been that if Daenerys Targaryen had found another Targaryen to wed and Oberyn Martell was at her side, he must have been the real Aegon. They were laughed out of sellsword companies and noble houses. The rumour had not yet carried the truth of Jon’s birth or looks, only that he was a Westerosi with the blood of Old Valyria. Eventually, Aegon decreed that they would go further east still. It was said that in Asshai, strange things could be done. He had too few friends already, he said, to lose one such as Jon. Jon managed not to cry in front of him, by sheer force of will.

“I don’t want to be alone,” he said, sounding so very young. Jon shook his head, but let Aegon decide. Aegon chose Asshai, and lost his future for it.

Arthur lets him go, leaving Jon to rub at the bruised back of his head. 

Lannister says, “have you made your decision?”

Aegon lives. There’s no other option. Aegon lives, and he doesn’t kill Rhaegar’s youngest son. Nothing else is acceptable. 

“Varys told me the child was Rhaegar’s,” he says, so quietly he can barely hear himself. “Do you think that will be enough to buy his life?”

The lovers look carefully at each other. Lannister looks wicked, Dayne serious. 

“You know,” Lannister says, “it just might.”

With very little ceremony, Tyene Sand becomes the next Master of Whispers. It’s never explained or discussed save with a select few. With slightly more ceremony, Daenerys proclaims the return of her brother’s dear friend, Jon Connington, and returns to him several titles. Stannis Baratheon, his liege lord, grits his teeth and puts up with it. He performs courtesies exactly as required and then, with some very direct instructions from Queen Daenerys, betroths Shireen to Lord Connington’s odd heir, a funny boy named Griff whose mother, Connington alleges, was Lyseni. More people would joke about this, about the probable whore’s-son who looks more Targaryen than Prince Jon, if it were not for fact that they were already filled with gossip about what, exactly, Connington had done in his time in Essos to merit such an honour. It was said that he had travelled into the ruins of old Valyria and brought Daenerys her dragon eggs, for what else could have earned a shamed house the right to marry into the blood of the dragon? This, of course, was a lie, but it was a useful lie, and Prince Jon and his court were familiar with nothing more than useful lies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So to clarify what happened here: there was a period where everyone in Essos was convinced that Jon, who was riding dragons and married to Dany, was probably really Aegon (after all, he came from Dorne, and Aegon was Elia’s kid, and Oberyn was at his side). This had unintended consequences for JonCon’s plans, because it meant everyone assumed he was passing the kid off as Jon Snow, which was obviously a lie. So eventually they gave up and went to Asshai to try and find someone who could cure greyscale. Surprisingly, this worked, but by that point everything in Westeros was already settled and the only person who hadn’t (obviously) been bought by Dany and Jon was Jaime, who, to an outside observer, would have plenty of reason to hate her.
> 
> Also, I’m not solidly convinced that Dany’s keep-you-enemies-close plan of marrying Shireen and Aegon is a good one (although it does restrict the blood lines of people who could claim to be Targaryens to just-the-Baratheons), but it does seem like something she would do.
> 
> Thanks to everyone for sticking with this story!


End file.
